The impact of article length on the number of future citations: a bibliometric analysis of general medicine journals.

Background: The number of citations received is considered an index of study quality and impact. We aimed to examine the factors associated with the number of citations of published articles, focusing on the article length.

Methods: Original human studies published in the first trimester of 2006 in 5 major General Medicine journals were analyzed with regard to the number of authors and of author-affiliated institutions, title and abstract word count, article length (number of print pages), number of bibliographic references, study design, and 2006 journal impact factor (JIF).