  The objective of this research is to determine if the reference to a country
in the title, keywords or abstract of a publication can influence its
visibility (measured by the impact factor of the publishing journal) and
citability (measured by the citations received). The study is based on Italian
scientific production indexed in the Web of Science over the period 2004-2011.
The analysis is conducted by comparing the values of four impact indicators for
two subsets: i) the indexed publications with a country's name in the title,
keywords or abstract; ii) the remainder of the population, with no country'
name. The results obtained both at the general level and by subject category
show that publications with a country name systematically receive lower impact
values, with the exception of a limited number of subject categories, Also, the
incidence of highly-cited articles is lower for the first subset.
