With alternative metrics, such as media coverage and social media mentions, being increasingly used by the academic community to gauge the success of research, it’s perhaps no surprise that those metrics also have an impact on the most traditional measure of success: the citation record.
That’s precisely what new research from Brigham Young University finds, after its analysis of around 800 research papers in the field of physical health and exercise. The research found a clear correlation between the media coverage a paper received, and its subsequent attention from the scientific community.
The researchers attempted to better understand the relationship between media reporting of a study, and its citation record in other peer-reviewed papers. The analysis included 818 papers that were published in 2007 or 2008, with the popular media attention for each paper assessed alongside the number of citations it received. They also factored in the reputation of both the authors of the paper and the journal they were published in.
Success breeds success
The analysis reveals a clear association between the volume of media coverage a paper receives and the number of citations it receives. What is less clear, of course, is quite which of these causes which. In other words, it’s not clear whether highly cited papers tend to get more media coverage, or whether the media coverage encourages more researchers to cite the paper. Indeed, there might be a third factor that the researchers haven’t accounted for.
The researchers accept this weakness, and plan to conduct further analyses to clarify this relationship. They’re nonetheless confident that their findings can help to better inform research institutions regarding the importance of scientific impact.
“Results from this study confirm the idea that media attention given to scientific research is strongly related to scientific citations for that same research,” the authors conclude. “These results can inform scientists who are considering using popular media to increase awareness concerning their work, both within and outside the scientific community.”
