Increase the impact of your scholarship

With the exception of a few disciplines, most studies indicate longer articles tend to gain more citations than shorter ones. There are several possible explanations for the favorable treatment authors give long articles. View the full page to learn more and see our suggestions to make your articles cover more pages.

The vast majority of studies, including the largest one we looked at, found that the more references a paper has, the more likely it is to be cited by other articles. This page provides studies supporting this assertion and discusses the one subject where it may not apply.

The most unequivocal and least surprising finding of citation studies is that articles published in top journals tend to be cited more often than those published in lower ranked journals. Every single article we found that considered journal quality, concluded that publishing in higher ranked journals increases chances of citations.