Academic clickbait: Articles with positively-framed titles, interesting phrasing, and no wordplay get more attention online

Lockwood, G. (2016). Academic clickbait: Articles with positively-framed titles, interesting phrasing, and no wordplay get more attention online. The Winnower, 3: e146723.36330. doi:10.15200/winn.146723.36330.
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.
Publication type
Journal article
Publication date
2016

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