Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, Ahead of Print.
For understandable reasons, scholarly impact statistics have become a contentious issue for university faculty. They often look to their librarians to advise them on how best to monitor their performance, and what they could do to raise their profile. The present investigation seeks to equip those librarians with background and tools to provide useful perspective to their worried patrons. For over forty years the literature has been debating what characteristics of an article influence its later citation. While many suppose that outcome is determined solely by the quality and originality of the piece, one of the consistent findings has been that arguably irrelevant features appear to play an important role. The present discussion focuses on two of the most prominent such features, whether the article title includes a colon, and how long that title is. Both of these variables have been widely researched, but the outcomes are not typically offered in a form that will be useful to faculty patrons. Specifically, while both colons and shorter titles, for whatever reasons, reliably correlate with higher citations, these patterns vary by discipline and are not conveniently aggregated and reported. To fill this need, results have been extracted from seventy-four empirical investigations and presented by discipline. A wide range of disciplinary variance was found for these two variables which can be considered by an author. This collection of findings also has permitted correction of prior hypotheses about why such apparently irrelevant elements influence citation, which can improve understanding of the drivers of scholarly impact statistics.