A study on factors related to readership of scientific articles
This paper analyzes the relationship between the number of Twitter and Mendeley readers with the article’s subject, publisher, journal, and title length. It also looks at which country has the greatest number of readers to see if researchers can garner more visibility by publishing an article relevant to issues in those countries. The purpose of this report is to help researchers improve the visibility and impact value of their research. The data was gathered from 550,000 scientific research papers published between January 1st and July 1st of 2016. Python’s built-in JSON library was used to extract the number of Twitter and Mendeley readers, as well as the article count for each factor. The correlation between readers per article and each factor was then visualized using bubble graphs, linear regression models, and scatter plots. This paper concludes that the length of the title is the strongest factor affecting readership. In particular, titles with lengths between 51 and 90 characters have the greatest number of readers. Moreover, articles relevant to issues in countries with a higher GDP have the highest overall readership. On the other hand, the publisher and the journal did not have a significant effect on readership, while the subject of the article had a moderate effect on readership.