The reputations of researchers and journals alike are substantially based on the frequency with which their publications are cited. Some inquiry has examined predictors of citation counts, but these studies generally do not examine education research, and the findings often diverge considerably across disciplines or fields of study. The present study examined predictors of citation counts within 17,114 articles published in 30 Scopus-indexed U.S. higher education journals over a 25-year period. Negative binomial regression analyses identified various significant predictors of citation counts, including the length of the article and abstract; whether the article is a review paper or is published open access; the number of authors; the gender, publication productivity, institutional prestige, and country of the first author; the topic of the article; and even whether the title has a colon. Some of these observed relationships vary as a function of the ranking of the journal. Implications for higher education scholars, journal editors, publishers, academic departments, and institutions are discussed.
Bowman et al. (2026) studied this question.