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 diagrams found in scholarly computational linguistics conference proceedings (ACL 2017), and find inclusion of a system diagram to be correlated with higher numbers of citations after three years. Inclusion of more than three diagrams in this 8-page limit conference was found to correlate with a lower citation count. Focusing on neural network system diagrams, we find a correlation between highly cited papers and \good diagramming practice" quantified by level of compliance with a set of diagramming guidelines. This study suggests that diagrams may be a useful source of quality data for predicting citations, and that \graphicacy" is a key skill for scholars with insufficient support at present.