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When faced with numerous articles on their topic, how do scholars make the decision of which articles to read? A recent study, commissioned by the Publishing Research Consortium, asked scholars to rank which article characteristics are most important to them, including journal stature, journal familiarity, type of publisher, author stature, and so on. Respondents were then asked to choose from composite profiles of articles using some of these characteristics to measure how important characteristics are when readers are faced with choices and tradeoffs. A pilot study suggested that article stature and title are important; this talk will present findings from the full study of hundreds of scholars in multiple institutions.