The title of a research paper matters because it signals to potential readers the content of the paper, and helps them to determine whether it is worthwhile to read (or cite). The title of a research paper may therefore affect how often the paper is cited. As I've noted before, papers with shorter titles tend to gather more citations. However, there is also research that says the opposite, and there is no consensus on this point (e.g. see here).
The research I cited in this earlier post suggested that shorter titles might lead to more citations because they are more memorable. That may be the case, but in my experience an even better way to make a paper memorable is to make the title funny. I'll not easily forget "Riccardo Trezzi is immortal" (which I blogged about here), or "Japan's Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan". Of course, in both cases the content of the paper was funny, and that helped to make the title more memorable.
How important is humour in a paper title? That is the research question addressed in this new working paper by Stephen Heard (University of New Brunswick), Chloe Cull (Concordia University), and Easton White (University of New Hampshire). They collected data on 2439 papers in top ecology and evolution journals published in 2000 or 2001, and asked 11 volunteers to rate the titles in terms of the author's attempt at humour (rather than whether they raters thought the title was actually funny or not). Heard et al. then limited the sample to the 414 titles where at least one of the raters rated humour in the title at greater than zero (on a zero to six scale), as well as 650 randomly-selected articles rated as not-humorous. They then looked at how humour related to subsequent citations, and found that:
After we controlled for other predictors, total citations declined with average title humour...The effect was relatively small, with a decrease of 4% in total citations for each 1 point increase in average humour score, but this equates to a difference of 20.4% between the least and most humorous titles. There is, however, an important qualification: the pattern was similar, but much stronger, for self citations, with an 82% decrease for the most humorous titles... Thus, after correcting for underlying paper importance, funny title are cited more, not less... with a 23% increase for each 1 point increase in humour score.
So, funny paper titles get fewer citations, but Heard et al. infer that that is because researchers attach funny titles to papers that they think are less important. That's because (emphasis is theirs):
...papers with funnier titles are subsequently cited less by their own authors. Since authors don’t need titles to alert them to their own papers, self-citation provides a title-independent estimator of importance – unlike other citations.
Correcting for importance (self-citations), Heard et al. found that there was a positive relationship between humour and the number of citations. However, the way that they corrected for self-citations was to create a dependent variable that was total citations divided by self-citations. That seems a bit odd to me. Why not simply include self-citations as an additional explanatory variable, and subtract self-citations from the total citations in the dependent variable?
However, taking their results at face value, Heard et al. conclude that:
Advice to avoid humour in paper titles... is thus not well founded in evidence – at least, not if the concern is citation impact.
That may be true. It would be interesting to see whether these results extend into other fields. After all, ecologists might not be the most humorous of researchers. Economists are clearly much funnier. On a more serious note, it would be interesting to see whether humour has differential impacts at different points in the quality distribution. It wouldn't surprise me to find that a lower-quality paper gets a citation boost from having a funny title, while a higher-quality paper suffers a humour-related penalty.
Finally, Heard et al. titled their paper "If this title is funny, will you cite me? Citation impacts of humour and other features of article titles in ecology and evolution", about which they lament:
...funny titles increase impact. We regret, therefore, being unable to think of a funnier title for this paper.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
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