How to get cited!

After years of research, problem solving and brain storming the fact that a fellow researcher found your work helpful in his own research is so fulfilling. This makes citing one of the most important factors that determines the impact of a research paper in its respective field. In this article we will analyze the core influencing agents that drive successful citation, that in turn helps authors world-wide to get cited! well now, I hope you are excited!

In this study conducted by T. Liskiewicz, G. Liskiewicz and J. Paczesny the main underlying parameters considered are manuscript length, number of authors, number of affiliated institutions, number of international co-authors, number of cited references, number of words in the title and mode of publication i.e whether it is an open access or paid journal.

To obtain accurate results the researcher’s derived data from 4,756 papers of six different tribology journals (let’s say A to F) whose impact factors range from 1.037 to 3.517 and are published during the period between January 2010 and December 2015. One of the most important issue to consider here is the fact that the longer the paper is published the higher its citations are. So, the researchers considered citations per year believing it to be a fair comparison.

Considering the manuscript length first, predictably the longer the paper the better are the citations. But that doesn’t mean that the author should increase the length of his publication intentionally, rather look upon whether the research information is imparted completely. Moving on to the references cited, as expected the more the number of references the better the citations. This can be credited to the fact that the reach of the paper is directly proportional to number of references. Interestingly there is no considerable influence of number of words in the title to that of the citation. So, let’s agree that it’s better to keep the title as concise and articulated as possible. One very encouraging finding is that, as the number of authors, institutions and countries involved in the research increase the citation count will also change positively. This is another reason to collaborate with fellow researchers from different institutions, cultures and geographical locations. As this will also bring different interesting perspectives to the research. Lastly, we are in for no surprises under the type of publication factor. The citations are more for open access journals.

The key takeaways from this article should be that, while putting hours of works into research to attain satisfactory results by discovering and re-discovering new perspectives and knowledge in different fields are the key qualities of a researcher. The factors discussed above should be considered by the author while publishing his work by keeping them in the back of his mind. This will in turn help his work to get maximum reach but again this should in no way alter the way the research or information that is intended to share. In short words I feel that Goodhart’s law mentioned by the authors will convey the true essence of their research.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement.”

References:

[1] Factors affecting the citations of papers in tribology journals, T. Liskiewicz, G. Liskiewicz and J. Paczesny,  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03870-w

 
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