June 2019

Fact or Fiction? Hyphens in an article title negatively impact citation counts

Submitted by Rachel McCullough
on Wed, 06/12/2019 - 17:59

A recent article in the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering by Zhi Quan Zhou, T.H. Tse, and Matt Witheridge, doi: 10.1109/TSE.2019.2915065, has drawn attention due to its claim that the number of hyphens in article titles negatively impacts the citation counts of such articles in abstract and citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science.

Hyphens do not play a role in Scopus reference linking. Scopus matching algorithms (e.g.