Citations are one way of measuring a research article's visibility and impact, often resulting in tangible benefits for the authors in question. 

Thus, the scientific community is keen to find new ways to bump up their numbers - and a new study suggests that one way for articles to stand out from the crowd is having shorter titles.

Researchers led by Adrian Letchford at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK analysed the titles of 140,000 highly cited published research articles and found that articles with shorter titles gained more citations.

The results of the study were published in Royal Society Open Science and reported in Nature News, where Letchford added that the researchers had spent "quite a lot of time" wondering what title to give their own paper. (They settled on "The advantage of short paper titles.")

The researchers suggested that shorter titles might be simply more attractive, resulting in more attention, leading to wider readership and naturally more impact. 

Shorter titles do make easier Tweets, and it's worth noting that social media sharing is yet another way to build citations.

But it's important to point out that these results are likely biased by the fact that many prestigious older journals have a hard character limit on titles. 

Nature itself, for example, insists on a two-printed-line limit for titles, which is about 75-90 characters - less than the length of a Tweet. In days when scientific publishing was more reliant on the whims of printing presses, this allowed typesetters to keep their pages looking consistent - helping them plan every expensive printed page.

Now, with many articles being read online, this constraint - like charging extra fees for printing coloured figures - is no longer strictly necessary. Many older journals have retained these character limits as a nod to tradition and style. And, since older journals tend to have established followings, it's likely that brevity is not the sole reason for their success.

But if these survey results are accurate, this news story - with the shortest title we've yet produced - may garner more attention than its wordier fellows.

We'll watch the statistics with interest.

ecancermedicalscience does not have a hard limit on title lengths, but we'd be interested in collecting our own data on title length and citations! Submit your article here.