Has article title relation with the number of citations in Brazilian medical literature?

Study carried out at Laboratório de Cirurgia Experimental, Universidade do Estado do Pará – UEPA, Belém, PA, Brasil. Summary: Purpose: To assess the importance of the title structure on the citation rate in Brazilian literature. Methods: All the original research articles published in five Brazilian medical journals were analyzed. The numbers of citations of each article was retrieved from Google Scholar and each title was placed into one of the three groups: 1) titles describing the research methods/ design (methods-describing title); 2) titles describing the results/conclusions (results-describing title); and 3) titles that were nonclassifiable. Number of words and characters; reference to a geographical area; use of a hyphen or colon; mentioning of drugs; and description of study design were extracted. Results: There were 442 (88.4%) methods-describing titles, 43 (8.6%) resultsdescribing titles, and 15 (3%) questions titles. The number of citations for the group 1 was significantly less than the number of citations for group 2 and group 3 articles (p<0.05). There were no correlations between the number of characters and words in the title and the numbers of citations. Titles referring to a specific geographical region were significantly more cited than titles that did not reference a geographical region. Conclusion: The structure proposing a question, along with the results-describing titles were found to be relevant for a high citation rate nationally since it facilitates the literature review. The presence of a specific geographical location on the title also proved to be significant probably due to a great regionalization of diseases in Brazil.