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Frequency distribution of journalistic attention for scientific studies and scientific sources: An input-output analysis
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, PLoS ONE, Vol 15, Iss 11, p e0241376 (2020), PLOS ONE, 15, Art.-Nr.: e0241376
- Publication Year :
- 2020
-
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.
- Subjects :
- Technology
Time Factors
Medical Journals
Science
Journalism
Decision Making
Social Sciences
Research and Analysis Methods
Cognition
Sociology
Medicine and Health Sciences
Psychology
Mass Media
Social Change
Scientific Publishing
Likelihood Functions
Altmetrics
Social Research
Research
Cognitive Psychology
Biology and Life Sciences
Research Assessment
Probability Theory
Communications
Bibliometrics
Physical Sciences
Medicine
Cognitive Science
Periodicals as Topic
ddc:600
Medical Humanities
Mathematics
Research Article
Neuroscience
Statistical Distributions
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 15
- Issue :
- 11
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PloS one
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....00782fa48ff8d1c589c23aee7d6a5635