Relationship between citation metrics and the characteristics of article titles in dermatology journals

Evidence shows that article titles might affect citation metrics. This study aimed to evaluate the association between selected citation metrics and the title characteristics in dermatology journals.

We enrolled 305 reviews and original articles published during 2016 from four dermatology journals consisting of the “Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology,” “Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology,” “Indian Journal of Dermatology, Venereology and Leprology,” and “International Journal of Dermatology” using a stratified and simple random sampling method. The list of articles was extracted from Scopus; then, the title characteristics were reviewed. Moreover, we extracted the citation metrics, including the citation count, Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), and citation benchmarking percentile of the articles until the end of October 2021 using Scopus. For statistical analysis, we used Stata software version 14.2.

Overall, 239 (78.36%) original and 66 (21.64%) review articles were included. The citation count and FWCI significantly and positively correlated with the number of words, characters, and punctuation marks in the titles. By adjusting the covariates, linear logistic regression showed that the title length and the presence of acronyms in the title were the most effective factors in increasing the citation count and FWCI of the articles.

Using longer titles and including acronyms in the titles may help augment the citation of articles in dermatology journals.