Article length and citation outcomes

Abstract

We examine the relationship between article length and citation counts. Focusing on articles published between 2010 and 2014 in the top five economics journals and their citation count in Google Scholar, we find that a 1% increase in page length is associated with a 0.56% increase in the number of citations. A small survey of economists suggests that this effect may be a result of longer articles containing both theory and empirical elements. We discuss how our paper improves on previous estimates of the correlation between article length and citation counts. Show more