Well-tailored words: Comparing the fit of articles within scholarly journals to their citation rates

The articles published within a scholarly journal reflect the research interests and activities of the community of authors contributing to it; it is not only the underlying ideas that may be shared, but the language used to express them. This work-in-progress uses the text of articles’ abstracts to attempt to further understand the relationship between scholarly articles and the journals in which they are published, and, through these, the communities and disciplines in which research takes place. An indicator of journal fit, leveraging cosine similarity, is used to characterize the positioning of articles within seventy-five journals across three subject areas, and is compared to the articles’ citation impact. A weak but significant correlation is found between the two, and differing distributions of fit across journals is observed.