Change title of the manuscript in arXiv I have written a paper and posted that in arXiv. The paper is cited once and I have cited roughly 40 manuscripts in my paper. I am now thinking that the title of my paper is not fully representing what is going on in the paper and I have a better alternative title for the paper. I have not published my paper in another journal and only the arXiv version exists on the internet.
I know when you submit a revised manuscript in arXiv all the previous version still remains public and this is not an issue for me.
My question is: Once I change the title what will happen to the cited paper (with the old title) and all the papers cited by this paper? Are the citations going to be removed since the paper is changed? Are the citations automatically point to the new manuscript? the last but not the least is Google scholar is going to point to the most recent version of the arXiv automatically?
I have read the following post: Change title to arXiv paper.
Google Scholar might show the two versions as separate articles, but you have the option to merge them in your profile. While merging, you get an option &quot;Select the best version of the article.&quot;. So, selecting the newer version here should ensure that the correct arXiv version is linked to.
Citations also get merged when merging articles. It is however possible that the citation count will have an asterisk next to it indicating that Google Scholar is not sure if both versions are the same paper. Citations would not get lost here, you also have the option to unmerge the articles any time.
I am not sure how new citations will be counted, but as long as the versions are merged, this should not matter since both versions will point to a single entry in your profile. I am also not sure what happens to citation counts of the papers that you cite. Ideally, your citation of those papers should not be counted twice, but Google Scholar's citation data often has errors for various reasons so one should only use them as a rough indicator and not as an exact count.