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arXiv · 2502.01417

Originality in scientific titles and abstracts can predict citation count

Jack H. Culbert·Yoed N. Kenett·Philipp Mayr
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Abstract

In this research-in-progress paper, we apply a computational measure correlating with originality from creativity science: Divergent Semantic Integration (DSI), to a selection of 99,557 scientific abstracts and titles selected from the Web of Science. We observe statistically significant differences in DSI between subject and field of research, and a slight rise in DSI over time. We model the base 10 logarithm of the citation count after 5 years with DSI and find a statistically significant positive correlation in all fields of research with an adjusted $R^2$ of 0.13.

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Jack H. Culbert, Yoed N. Kenett, Philipp Mayr. 2025-02-03. Originality in scientific titles and abstracts can predict citation count. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01417

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