Bibliometric analysis of manuscript characteristics that influence citations: A comparison of six major psychiatry journals

In this study we investigated the characteristics of psychiatry manuscript that influence its citation rate. We conducted a cross-sectional study of published articles (n = 545), from January to June 2007, from 6 major psychiatry journals with the highest 5-year impact-factor. Citation count for these articles was retrieved from Web Of Science (by Clarivate Analytics) and 22 article characteristics were tabulated manually. We then predicted the citation rate by performing univariate analysis, spearman rank-order correlation, and multiple regression model on the collected variables. Using spearman rank-order correlation, we found the following variables to have significant positive correlation with citations: abstract character count (r_s and p-value, 0.22 and 0.001 respectively), number of references (0.2, 0.01), abstract word count (0.17, 0.0005), number of pages (0.15, 0.003), open access (0.06, 0.05), study design reported in title (0.04, 0.0001), total number of words (0.03, 0.01) and structured abstract (0.03, 0.0009). In a multivariate linear regression model, the following variables predicted increased citation rates (p < 0.001, R² = 0.38): reporting of study design in title, structured abstract and open access. Editors and authors of psychiatry journals can improve the impact of their journals and articles by utilizing this bibliometric study when assembling their manuscript.