Academic clickbait: articles with positively-framed titles, interesting
phrasing, and no wordplay get more attention online.
Gwilym Lockwood
Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, 6525XD, the Netherlands
Corresponding Author:gwilym.lockwood@mpi.nl
Author ProfileAbstract
This article is about whether the factors which drive online sharing of
non-scholarly content also apply to academic journal titles. It uses
Altmetric scores as a measure of online attention to articles from
Frontiers in Psychology published in 2013 and 2014. Article titles with
result-oriented positive framing and more interesting phrasing receive
higher Altmetric scores, i.e., get more online attention. Article titles
with wordplay and longer article titles receive lower Altmetric scores.
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.