On the citation gap of articles naming countries

Titles of scholarly articles are generally a reflection of their content. They inform the reader about the methods, design, results or conclusion of the study, as well as on the context of the research. The mention of the name of a country, for example, provides a geographical contextualization of the article. In order to better understand the effect of these signaling devices on the reception of a study, this research in progress paper investigates the difference in citation rates of articles that mention a country in their title or abstract and articles that do not. It shows, using WoS-indexed papers published between 1996 and 2013, that mentioning a country in either the title or the abstract is associated with lower citation rates, and that this is observed for every country when all disciplines are combined. The gap in citation rates is also greater in Social Sciences than in other disciplines, which is likely due to their stronger focus on national issues.