Assessing What Distinguishes Highly Cited from Less-Cited Papers Published in Interfaces

We evaluate what distinguishes a highly cited Interfaces paper from other Interfaces papers that are cited less often. Citations are used to acknowledge prior relevant research, to document sources of information, and to substantiate claims. As such, citations play a key role in the evolution of knowledge. More recently, citations are also being used to quantify the impact of papers and journals, a practice not without controversy, but one that motivates our work here. We find that Edelman competition papers, longer papers, tutorials, papers with larger numbers of references to prior literature, and papers with a larger number of “callouts” (a feature no longer used by Interfaces) tend to have a higher number of citations.