The relevance of title, abstract, and keywords for scientific paper quality and potential impact

Abstract

Authors, editors, and reviewers need to have a good perception regarding the quality of a manuscript in order to improve their skills, save effort, and prevent errors that can affect the submission procedure. In this paper, we compared the author’s perception of a manuscript’s quality with the manuscript’s actual impact. In addition, we analyzed the uncertainty of the author’s perception of the manuscript’s quality. From there, we defined ‘partition’ as the author’s ability to perceive the actual quality. We did this by launching a website for the use of the scientific community. This webpage provided a tool to help improve an investigator’s skill in understanding and recognizing the quality of a manuscript so as to help researchers improve and maximize their works’ potential impact. We carried out the experiment with 106 experienced users who tested our webpage. We found that the Abstract, the Title, and the Keywords were enough to perform a substantially decent evaluation of a manuscript. Most of the researchers were able to determine the quality of a paper in less than a minute from this small amount of information.