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Published online 17 September 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/455274a
A longer paper gathers more citations
Brevity is not the secret to scientific success.
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Review papers tend to be long and they are cited a lot. Could this explain the trend?
I don't really see these results as being novel. It is long established for those doing bibliometric research that page length needs to be controlled for in citation analysis (along with a suite of other article characteristics). Had the author gone beyond citing recent articles in physics, he may have found that the social scientists have beat him by 25 years.
Is kindness not a factor? Long papers have more references than shorter ones. If they cite me, then I will be very grateful and probably consider to cite them in the next paper.
The content of the paper matters more than anything else. I mean to say that the relevance of findings published and the way of its presentation. Many a times only the abstracts are being refered and cited.
A short paper may be longer than a long paper with respect to Material and Methods and Result sections. In other words, a long paper may have disproportionately large Introduction and Discussion. These aspects needs to be factored in. On a different note, the news is not surprising. With higher contents, longer papers provide much more scope for reference hunting.
To conclude that bloating boosts citations, the proper study would have needed to show that, starting from the same data to be described, writing a lengthy paper attracts more citations than a concise one. But this is not a study that will ever be doable. If we drop the cynical attitude, we can then assume that, if longer papers were cited more, it was simply because they contained more stuff worth citing. The conclusion that follows logically is reassuring: If scientists produce longer papers, it is not for the sake of diluting information, but simply because they have more data to present. And more data means more chances that some of it will be relevant to a future study.