Abstract

This study aimed to assess the association between some features of articles title and number of citations in a volume of Addictive Behavior journal. All research articles published in the volume number 32 (2007) in the Addictive Behaviors journal (n = 302) were analyzed by two independent authors. For each article, the following information has been extracted: number of citations up to June 2013 in the Scopus citation database, type of and characteristics of titles, having different words in the keywords, reference to place and presence of an acronym. The summary statistics showed that mean number of citation was 16.36 +/- A 19.55 times. Articles with combinational title (use of a hyphen or a colon separating different ideas within a sentence) and articles with different words in the keywords (at least two different keywords) had higher number of citations. The number of citations was not correlated with the number of words in the title (r = 0.05, P = 0.325). Our results suggested that some features in the paper such as type of the title and articles with keywords different from words included in the title can help to predict the number of citation counts. These findings can be used by authors and reviewers in order to maximize the impact of articles. The length of title is not associated with citation counts. Therefore, the guide for authors of journals can be more flexible regarding the length of the title.