A psycholinguist reports that some of the factors that make headlines more clicky also apply to the titles of academic journal papers. Researcher Gwilym Lockwood of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics analyzed the titles of 2,000 papers published in the journal “Frontiers in Psychology” and their Altmetric Attention Score that measures social sharing, mentions in the news, and other metrics of attention. From Phys.org:
(The titles of the 2,000 papers were) coded for positive framing (e.g. using “smoking causes cancer”, rather than “the link between smoking and cancer”) and phrasing arousal (e.g. referring to “gambling” rather than “mathematical decision making”).
It turned out that articles with positive framing and phrasing arousal in their titles received higher Altmetric scores, meaning that they were shared more widely online. In contrast, having wordplay in the titles actually lead to lower Altmetric Attention Scores, while having a question in the title made no difference. This is independent of the length of the title or how interesting the topic was.
“This suggests that the same factors that affect how widely non-scholarly content is shared extend to academia, which has implications for how academics can make their work more likely to have more impact,” Lockwood writes in her own paper.
Do you think she applied what she learned to her paper’s title, “Academic clickbait: articles with positively-framed titles, interesting phrasing, and no wordplay get more attention online”?