Abstract
Scientific results traditionally disseminate to the scientific community via scientific journals. Studies’ importance is assessed through the number of citations in those journals. The medialization concept postulates an increasing orientation of science towards the mass media. Here, taking up this concept, we hypothesized that if science is indeed medialized, studies reported in newspaper will receive a higher number of citations. Three studies, focusing on publications in a few prestigious scientific journals and a single year, already concluded towards a citation’s advantage for studies featured in the press. Here, we analyzed the citation counts of 496 biomedical studies published between 1988 and 2013 in 38 distinct peer-reviewed journals with impact factors ranging from 5 to 51.7. To disentangle the effects of the impact factor and of the media coverage on the citation counts, we associated studies covered in English-speaking newspapers with similar studies (i.e. on the same subject published the same year and in the same scientific journal) not reported in the press. We confirmed that, for the whole period, studies reported in newspapers received on average more citations. Comparing across three impact factor levels, we showed that the citations’ advantage was more pronounced for lower impact factors (IF < 10). Among studies published in high impact factor journals (IF ≥ 30), only those covered by at least 10 newspapers articles received a higher citation’ count. Finally, coverage in influential newspapers leads to a stronger citation advantage. These observations raise concerns about the influence of the media on the research communication and dissemination.
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Notes
Media logics describe here criteria such as newsworthiness, use of metaphors, framing.
As aggregated by Factiva https://www.dowjones.com/products/factiva/.
Obtained from the Journal Citation Reports (Web of Science).
We selected Scopus as it provides the best coverage for the biomedical literature (Falagas, Pitsouni, Malietzis and Pappas 2008).
Five journals have an IF ≥ 30 in 2012: New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, Science and Nature.
Note that PNAS, investigated in Fanelli’s study (Fanelli 2013) has an IF of 9.7 in 2012.
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Acknowledgements
The research has been supported by a grant from the LabEx (Laboratoire d’Excellence) BRAIN (Bordeaux Region Aquitaine Initiative for Neurosciences).
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Dumas-Mallet, E., Garenne, A., Boraud, T. et al. Does newspapers coverage influence the citations count of scientific publications? An analysis of biomedical studies. Scientometrics 123, 413–427 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03380-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03380-1