Abstract
In this article, we test the hypothesis that computer science papers asking questions (i.e., those with a question mark at the end of their title) are cited more frequently than those that do not have this property. To this end, we analyze a data set of almost two million records on computer science papers indexed in the Web of Science database and focus our investigation on the mean number of citations per paper of its specific subsets. The main finding is that the average number of citations per paper of the so-called “asking papers” is greater by almost 20% than that of other papers, and that this difference is statistically significant.
Highlights
The impact of research publications is a fundamental feature of every basic research process that is supposed to generate new knowledge and present it in the form of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book chapters and other visible outputs of scientific publishing
While the higher skewness of all papers suggests a much longer right tail of the citation distribution consisting of many papers with no citations compared with the asking papers, the values of the zero medians for most groups of papers in Table 1 are in accordance with the percentages of the cited papers shown in the last column of the same table, in which only the asking papers had the share of papers cited greater than one half (50.44%) at least once
The main question arose of whether the difference between the mean values of the citations per paper of the asking papers and non-asking papers was large enough that we might conclude that papers with a question mark at the end of their titles were cited more frequently on average than other papers
Summary
The impact of research publications is a fundamental feature of every basic research process that is supposed to generate new knowledge and present it in the form of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book chapters and other visible outputs of scientific publishing. Anyone would like to conduct research without any impact at all on a particular discipline, scientific field, research area, science at large, economy, culture or society as a whole. It is the scientist who should be displeased with research having no impact, and (and perhaps foremost) the research funder, be it a research funding organization or the tax payer. The below analyses focus on diverse scientific disciplines, vary greatly in the size of analyzed data sets and are quite inconclusive with respect to the question asked in the title of this present paper, which is a reexamination of the data used in Fiala and Tutoky [1]
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