The Features of Cardiovascular Papers and Impact on Citations

The number of citations is a factor in evaluating the quality of scientific articles. The present study aims to examine the factors affecting the citation rate of cardiovascular articles.

In this scientometrics study, the research population is all cardiovascular articles in 2014 in Web of Science (WOS), which include a sample of 381 articles studied. Pearson correlation co-efficient, Mann–Whitney, Kruskal–Wallis, and Bonferroni tests were used to examine the impact of article features on citations.

The results indicated that all quantitative variables (title length, number of authors, author’s H-index, journal IF, number of pages, number of author’s keywords, number of keywords-plus, number of references)had a significant relationship with the number of citations (p-value<0.001), except for the number of article keywords. All of the qualitative variables (title length, number of authors, author’s H-index, journal IF, number of pages, number of author’s keywords, number of keywords-plus, number of references) also affect the number of citations (p-value<0.001). Open access articles, articles with the first author from Australia and North America, articles with inter-national collaboration, and meta-analysis articles have received the more citation rate.

Paying attention to the factors affecting the citation rate of cardiovascular articles can be of help to cardiovascular centers for policy- making and researchers in determining the research approach. In this way, they are able to improve the citation of their works