The impact of author-selected keywords on citation counts

A number of bibliometric studies have shown that many factors impact citation counts besides the scientific quality. This paper used a large bibliometric dataset to investigate the impact of the different statistical properties of author-selected keywords and the network attributes of their co-occurrence networks on citation counts. Four statistical properties of author-selected keywords were considered: (i) Keyword growth (i.e., the relative increase or decrease in the presence statistics of an underlying keyword over a given period of time); (ii) Keyword diversity (i.e., the level of variety in a set of author-selected keywords); (iii) Number of keywords; and (iv) Percentage of new keywords. This study also considered network centrality which is a network attribute from the keyword co-occurrence network. Network centrality was calculated using the average of three basic network centrality measures: degree, closeness and betweenness centrality. A correlation and regression analysis showed that all of these factors had a significant positive relation with citation counts except the percentage of new keywords that had a significant negative relation. However, when the effect of four potential control variables (i.e., the number of article authors, the length of an article, the quality of the journal in which the article was published and the length of the title of an article) were controlled, only four variables related to author-selected keywords showed a significant relation with citation counts. Keyword growth, number of keywords and network centrality showed a positive relation with citation counts; whereas, the percentage of new keywords showed a negative relation with citation counts. The implications of these findings are discussed in this article.