Researchers have found that usually the research articles that are longer get more citations as compared to the less-lengthy articles.
This research has been published online in the journal PLoS ONE.
The citations are considered as the quality of the study and thus show its value and impact on the scientific field. Researchers usually work on several factors, such as impact factor of the journal and study design, while writing a paper that may contribute to the increased citation of the paper as this may help them in the development of their career.
Recently researchers have worked to find the relation of the length of the article to the number of citations received by it. Researchers, after working on high impact factor journals, have found that the length of the article and the journal impact factor are independently associated with the number of citations received by the articles. They found on average 0.079 points of increase in the logarithm of citations per article for each additional page while 0.008 points of increase for every point of increase in the impact factor of the journal.
They found that in the field of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobial Agents, full length articles are cited more than the brief reports after adjusting for the impact factor of the journal. Similarly in the field of Astronomy and Astrophysics lengthier articles usually get more citations.
Researchers have found no impact of the title length on the future citations of the paper.
“For original research articles published in the major General Medicine journals, in addition to journal impact factor, the article length independently predicts the number of future citations. This probably reflects a higher complexity level and quality of longer studies and does not apply to inappropriately inflated articles. Additional studies are warranted to verify the generalizability of our findings to a largest part of the biomedical literature.” Researchers wrote.
Reference:
Falagas, M., Zarkali, A., Karageorgopoulos, D., Bardakas, V., & Mavros, M. (2013). The Impact of Article Length on the Number of Future Citations: A Bibliometric Analysis of General Medicine Journals PLoS ONE, 8 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0049476