Frequency distribution of journalistic attention for scientific studies and scientific sources: An input–output analysis

Abstract

Based on the decision-theoretical conditions underlying the selection of events for news coverage in science journalism, this article uses a novel input-output analysis to investigate which of the more than eight million scientific study results published between August 2014 and July 2018 have been selected by global journalism to a relevant degree. We are interested in two different structures in the media coverage of scientific results. Firstly, the structure of sources that journalists use, i.e. scientific journals, and secondly, the congruence of the journalistic selection of single results. Previous research suggests that the selection of sources and results follows a certain heavy-tailed distribution, a power law. Mathematically, this distribution can be described with a function of the form C*x-α. We argue that the exponent of such power law distributions can potentially be an indicator to describe selectivity in journalism on a high aggregation level. In our input-output analysis, we look for such patterns in the coverage of all scientific results published in the database Scopus over four years. To get an estimate of the coverage of these results, we use data from the altmetrics provider Altmetric, more precisely their Mainstream-Media-Score (MSM-Score). Based on exploratory analyses, we define papers with a score of 50 or above as Social Impact Papers (SIPs). Over our study period, we identified 5,833 SIPs published in 1,236 journals. For both the distribution of the source selection and the distribution of the selection of single results, an exponentially truncated power law is a better fit than the power law, mostly because we find a steeper decline in the tail of the distributions.

Patterns in the journalistic selection of neuroscientific research results

“…In a previous study, we have shown that the specific conditions and selection criteria in the journalistic coverage of new scientific results lead to an uneven frequency distribution of selected studies and journals (Lehmkuhl & Promies, 2020). In line with the argumentation of Esser's model of sociological explanation (1999), we assume that this social structure of congruent choice on the macro-level, i.e.…”

“…Studies by Suleski and Ibaraki (2010) and Kiernan (2016) also showed the dominance of just a few journals in the media coverage of scientific results. Lehmkuhl and Promies (2020) have summarized all studies which analyzed science journalists' preferred sources. They discovered that journalistic coverage of scientific results is primarily based on the journals Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.…”

“…Based on the review of several previous studies and their own data from an input-output analysis, Lehmkuhl and Promies (2020) found that power law distributions (or a variation, a so-called truncated power law) are present in the distribution of journalistic references to scientific journals and single results. The share of studies that are selected by a certain number of media titles decreases by a factor of about 1/x 4 with every additional media title.…”

“…To test this assumption, this study builds on the results of (Lehmkuhl & Promies, 2020) and tests the performance of this indicator for the comparison of different journalistic fields. We aim to examine the structures of journalistic selectivity for neuroscientific research results compared to scientific research in general.…”

“…Therefore, and in order to reduce the type I error, only studies with an MSM score ≥ 100 were used in this analysis. We call these studies 'social impact papers' (SIP, see Lehmkuhl & Promies, 2020).…”