Health care articles with simple and declarative titles were more likely to be in the Altmetric Top 100
Abstract
Objectives The aim of this study was to assess whether specific title characteristics could influence the likelihood of being included in the "Altmetric Top 100."Methods We conducted a 1:2 matched case-control study with the cases being the health care articles included in the "Altmetric Top 100" lists (2013-2015) matched through a random computerized procedure with two health care articles published in the same journal and year. For each title, we extracted the number of characters in the title, the number of uncommon words, and whether the title was declarative. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence intervals adjusted for a prespecified baseline confounder (open access).Results One hundred eight "Medical and health sciences" articles were retrieved in the 2013-2015 "Altmetric Top 100" and matched to 216 control articles. Titles of the "Altmetric Top 100" articles were 102.6 characters (±42) long, included 3.4 (±2.0) uncommon words, and 29.6% (32/108) were "declarative." Titles of the matched articles were 109.3 characters (±37.1) long, included 4.7 (±2.4) uncommon words, and 21.8% (47/216) were "declarative." After multivariate adjustment, declarative titles with a lower number of uncommon words were significantly more represented in the Altmetric list, with declarative titles having 2.8 times the odds of being in the top list (OR: 2.8; 95% confidence interval: 1.2, 6.4). For each additional uncommon word in the title, there was a 1.4 increase in the odds of being a non-Altmetric Top 100 article (1.4; 1.2-1.6).Conclusion An easy-to-understand, informative title may help bridge the gap between scholar and social media dissemination.
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Bolder framing may be a deliberate choice resulting from perverse incentives, when scientists have to convince journals, funding agencies, and the broader public of the importance of their research.
“At the same time, bolder framing such as this may be a deliberate choice resulting from perverse incentives, when scientists have to convince journals, funding agencies, and the broader public of the importance of their research (14,51,52).”
From Generic language in scientific communication (2019) · cites this paper as [52]
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- Authors
- Di Girolamo, N., & Reynders, R. M.
- Affiliations
- Amsterdam UMC Location University of Amsterdam (NL)
- Venue
- Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2017-05
- Volume
- 85
- Pages
- 32-36
- ISSN
- 0895-4356 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2564454635
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 21
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 2.83
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion)
- UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) (submittedVersion)
- VU Research Portal (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Keywords
- article titles, title length, social media attention, scholarly communication, open access
- MeSH terms
- Delivery of Health Care, Humans, Periodicals as Topic, Bibliometrics, Case-Control Studies, Journal Impact Factor
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