The effect of a country’s name in the title of a publication on its visibility and citability

The objective of this research is to determine if the reference to a country in the title, keywords or abstract of a publication can influence its visibility (measured by the impact factor of the publishing journal) and citability (measured by the citations received). The study is based on Italian scientific production indexed in the Web of Science over the period 2004–2011. The analysis is conducted by comparing the values of four impact indicators for two subsets: (1) the indexed publications with a country’s name in the title, keywords or abstract; (2) the remainder of the population, with no country’ name. The results obtained both at the general level and by subject category show that publications with a country name systematically receive lower impact values, with the exception of a limited number of subject categories, Also, the incidence of highly-cited articles is lower for the first subset.