Number and quality of diagrams in scholarly publications is associated with number of citations

Diagrams are often used in scholarly communication. We analyse a corpus of\ndiagrams found in scholarly computational linguistics conference proceedings\n(ACL 2017), and find inclusion of a system diagram to be correlated with higher\nnumbers of citations after 3 years. Inclusion of over three diagrams in this\n8-page limit conference was found to correlate with a lower citation count.\nFocusing on neural network system diagrams, we find a correlation between\nhighly cited papers and "good diagramming practice" quantified by level of\ncompliance with a set of diagramming guidelines. Two diagram classification\ntypes (one visually based, one mental model based) were not found to correlate\nwith number of citations, but enabled quantification of heterogeneity in those\ndimensions. Exploring scholarly paper-writing guides, we find diagrams to be a\nneglected media. This study suggests that diagrams may be a useful source of\nquality data for predicting citations, and that "graphicacy" is a key skill for\nscholars with insufficient support at present.\n