  We conducted a large-scale analysis of around 10,000 scientific articles,
from the period 2007-2016, to study the bibliometric or formal aspects
influencing citations. A transversal analysis was conducted disaggregating the
articles into more than one hundred scientific areas and two groups, one
experimental and one control, each with a random sample of around five thousand
documents. The experimental group comprised a random sample of the top 1% most
cited articles in each field and year of publication (highly cited articles),
and the control group a random sample of the remaining articles in the Journal
Citation Reports (science and social science citation indexes in the Web of
Science database). As the main result, highly cited articles differ from
non-highly cited articles in most of the bibliometric aspects considered. There
are significant differences, below the 0.01 level, between the groups of
articles in many variables and areas. The highly cited articles are published
in journals of higher impact factor (33 percentile points above) and have 25%
higher co-authorship. The highly cited articles are also longer in terms of
number of pages (10% higher) and bibliographical references (35% more).
Finally, highly cited articles have slightly shorter titles (3% lower) but,
contrastingly, longer abstracts (10% higher).
