Are Papers Asking Questions Cited More Frequently in Computer Science?

In this article, we test the hypothesis that computer science papers asking questions (i.e., those with a question mark at the end of their title) are cited more frequently than those that do not have this property. To this end, we analyze a data set of almost two million records on computer science papers indexed in the Web of Science database and focus our investigation on the mean number of citations per paper of its specific subsets. The main finding is that the average number of citations per paper of the so-called “asking papers” is greater by almost 20% than that of other papers, and that this difference is statistically significant.