What increases (social) media attention: Research impact, author prominence or title attractiveness?

TL;DR

This study examines how scientific impact, author prominence, and title attractiveness influence media attention, analyzing linguistic and collaboration features of papers from Nature Communication and PNAS.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of linguistic and collaboration features as indicators of media attention across different journals and disciplines.

Findings

Linguistic features correlate with media attention.

Author centrality influences media visibility.

Different journals and disciplines show distinct patterns.

Abstract

Do only major scientific breakthroughs hit the news and social media, or does a 'catchy' title help to attract public attention? How strong is the connection between the importance of a scientific paper and the (social) media attention it receives? In this study we investigate these questions by analysing the relationship between the observed attention and certain characteristics of scientific papers from two major multidisciplinary journals: Nature Communication (NC) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). We describe papers by features based on the linguistic properties of their titles and centrality measures of their authors in their co-authorship network. We identify linguistic features and collaboration patterns that might be indicators for future attention, and are characteristic to different journals, research disciplines, and media sources.