Hyphens in paper titles harm citation counts and journal impact factors

Scopus and Web of Science are the two leading

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citation indexing systems. Scopus provides the citation statistics to support the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings. Web of Science provides the journal impact factor that supports the ranking of major journals. Because of the importance of these two indexing systems, it is essential to assure their quality. In particular, robustness testing refers to the verification of the systems' ability to deal with erroneous inputs or unexpected situations. For example, can the indexing system handle a citation properly if there is a minor typo when quoting the paper title?

Professor Tse and team members proposed an innovative method named "metamorphic robustness testing" to verify Scopus and Web of Science. The in-depth study uncovered robustness defects in both systems that might produce erroneous citation counts for papers with hyphens in the titles, so that the journal impact factors subsequently computed are problematic.

Back in 2015, Letchford and colleagues conducted a large-scale study on Scopus, and found that papers with shorter titles tended to be cited more than those with longer titles.

On the contrary, Professor Tse and the present team find that it is actually the number of hyphens in the title that serves as the more dominating factor for citation counts. Usually, the number of hyphens is correlated to a paper's title length, thus giving the misinterpretation that citation counts depend on title length.

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-hyphens-paper-titles-citation-journal.html