IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v150y2018icp311-324.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Title length

Author

Listed:
  • Bramoullé, Yann
  • Ductor, Lorenzo

Abstract

We document strong and robust negative correlations between the length of the title of an economics article and different measures of scientific quality. Analyzing all articles published between 1970 and 2011 and referenced in EconLit, we find that articles with shorter titles tend to be published in better journals, to be more cited and to be more innovative. These correlations hold controlling for unobserved time-invariant and observed time-varying characteristics of teams of authors.

Suggested Citation

  • Bramoullé, Yann & Ductor, Lorenzo, 2018. "Title length," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 150(C), pages 311-324.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:150:y:2018:i:c:p:311-324
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2018.01.014
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268118300143
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jebo.2018.01.014?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Matthias Gnewuch & Klaus Wohlrabe, 2017. "Title characteristics and citations in economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(3), pages 1573-1578, March.
    2. Benjamin M. Althouse & Jevin D. West & Carl T. Bergstrom & Theodore Bergstrom, 2009. "Differences in impact factor across fields and over time," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(1), pages 27-34, January.
    3. Lorenzo Ductor & Marcel Fafchamps & Sanjeev Goyal & Marco J. van der Leij, 2014. "Social Networks and Research Output," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 96(5), pages 936-948, December.
    4. Sanjeev Goyal & Marco J. van der Leij & José Luis Moraga-Gonzalez, 2006. "Economics: An Emerging Small World," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 114(2), pages 403-432, April.
    5. Nick Haslam & Lauren Ban & Leah Kaufmann & Stephen Loughnan & Kim Peters & Jennifer Whelan & Sam Wilson, 2008. "What makes an article influential? Predicting impact in social and personality psychology," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 76(1), pages 169-185, July.
    6. Matthew E Falagas & Angeliki Zarkali & Drosos E Karageorgopoulos & Vangelis Bardakas & Michael N Mavros, 2013. "The Impact of Article Length on the Number of Future Citations: A Bibliometric Analysis of General Medicine Journals," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(2), pages 1-8, February.
    7. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, 2013. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 6, pages 99-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    8. Glenn Ellison, 2002. "The Slowdown of the Economics Publishing Process," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 110(5), pages 947-993, October.
    9. David Card & Stefano DellaVigna, 2013. "Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(1), pages 144-161, March.
    10. Marcel Fafchamps & Sanjeev Goyal & Marco J. van der Leij, 2010. "Matching and Network Effects," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 8(1), pages 203-231, March.
    11. Lorenzo Ductor, 2015. "Does Co-authorship Lead to Higher Academic Productivity?," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 77(3), pages 385-407, June.
    12. Kodrzycki Yolanda K. & Yu Pingkang, 2006. "New Approaches to Ranking Economics Journals," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 1-44, August.
    13. Kodrzycki Yolanda K. & Yu Pingkang, 2006. "New Approaches to Ranking Economics Journals," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 1-44.
    14. Hamid R. Jamali & Mahsa Nikzad, 2011. "Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 88(2), pages 653-661, August.
    15. Torres, Arturo Balderas & Marchant, Rob & Lovett, Jon C. & Smart, James C.R. & Tipper, Richard, 2010. "Analysis of the carbon sequestration costs of afforestation and reforestation agroforestry practices and the use of cost curves to evaluate their potential for implementation of climate change mitigat," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(3), pages 469-477, January.
    16. Lee, You-Na & Walsh, John P. & Wang, Jian, 2015. "Creativity in scientific teams: Unpacking novelty and impact," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 684-697.
    17. Kevin J. Boudreau & Eva C. Guinan & Karim R. Lakhani & Christoph Riedl, 2016. "Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource Allocation in Science," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(10), pages 2765-2783, October.
    18. David Card & Stefano DellaVigna, 2014. "Page Limits on Economics Articles: Evidence from Two Journals," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 28(3), pages 149-168, Summer.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ali Sina Önder & Sascha Schweitzer & Hakan Yilmazkuday, 2021. "Field Distance and Quality in Economists’ Collaborations," Working Papers in Economics & Finance 2021-04, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group.
    2. Syed Hasan & Robert Breunig, 2021. "Article length and citation outcomes," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 7583-7608, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lorenzo Ductor & Sanjeev Goyal & Anja Prummer, 2018. "Gender & Collaboration," Working Papers 856, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    2. Lorenzo Ductor & Bauke Visser, 2023. "Concentration of power at the editorial boards of economics journals," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(2), pages 189-238, April.
    3. Ali Sina Önder & Sascha Schweitzer & Hakan Yilmazkuday, 2021. "Field Distance and Quality in Economists’ Collaborations," Working Papers in Economics & Finance 2021-04, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group.
    4. Önder, Ali Sina & Schweitzer, Sascha & Yilmazkuday, Hakan, 2021. "Specialization, field distance, and quality in economists’ collaborations," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(4).
    5. Ductor, Lorenzo & Visser, Bauke, 2022. "When a coauthor joins an editorial board," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 200(C), pages 576-595.
    6. Syed Hasan & Robert Breunig, 2021. "Article length and citation outcomes," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 7583-7608, September.
    7. Albornoz, Facundo & Cabrales, Antonio & Hauk, Esther & Warnes, Pablo E., 2017. "Intergenerational field transitions in economics," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 154(C), pages 1-5.
    8. Koenig, Michael & Hsieh, Chih-Sheng & Liu, Xiaodong & Zimmermann, Christian, 2020. "Collaboration in Bipartite Networks, with an Application to Coauthorship Networks," CEPR Discussion Papers 15195, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    9. Hsieh, Chih-Sheng & König, Michael D. & Liu, Xiaodong & Zimmermann, Christian, 2018. "Superstar Economists: Coauthorship Networks and Research Output," IZA Discussion Papers 11916, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    10. Andrikopoulos, Andreas & Trichas, Georgios, 2018. "Publication patterns and coauthorship in the Journal of Corporate Finance," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 98-108.
    11. James J. Heckman & Sidharth Moktan, 2020. "Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Tyranny of the Top Five," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 58(2), pages 419-470, June.
    12. Dennis Essers & Francesco Grigoli & Evgenia Pugacheva, 2022. "Network effects and research collaborations: evidence from IMF Working Paper co-authorship," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(12), pages 7169-7192, December.
    13. Ductor, Lorenzo & Prummer, Anja, 2024. "Gender homophily, collaboration, and output," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 221(C), pages 477-492.
    14. Lorenzo Ductor & Sanjeev Goyal & Anja Prummer, 2023. "Gender and Collaboration," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 105(6), pages 1366-1378, November.
    15. Koffi, Marlene, 2021. "Innovative ideas and gender inequality," CLEF Working Paper Series 35, Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF), University of Waterloo.
    16. Georg, Co-Pierre & Opolot, Daniel C. & Rose, Michael E., 2017. "Informal intellectual collaboration with central colleagues," Kiel Working Papers 2084, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    17. Rodrigo Dorantes-Gilardi & Aurora A. Ramírez-Álvarez & Diana Terrazas-Santamaría, 2023. "Is there a differentiated gender effect of collaboration with super-cited authors? Evidence from junior researchers in economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(4), pages 2317-2336, April.
    18. Carlo D'Ippoliti, 2021. "“Many‐Citedness”: Citations Measure More Than Just Scientific Quality," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(5), pages 1271-1301, December.
    19. Stéphane Bonhomme, 2021. "Selection on Welfare Gains: Experimental Evidence from Electricity Plan Choice," Working Papers 2021-15, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    20. Bosquet, Clément & Combes, Pierre-Philippe, 2013. "Do large departments make academics more productive? agglomeration and peer effects in research," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 58306, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Title length; Journal quality; Citations; Novelty;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A10 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - General
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:150:y:2018:i:c:p:311-324. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jebo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.