10.6084/m9.figshare.4796548.v4
Kayvan Kousha
Kayvan
Kousha
Mike Thelwall
Mike
Thelwall
Which types of research are newsworthy? UK newspapers 2006-2015 citing Web of Science journals
figshare
2017
newspapers
Citation analysis
UK
Web of Science
Journal
Library and Information Studies
2017-09-30 20:08:23
Journal contribution
https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Which_types_of_research_are_newsworthy_An_analysis_of_UK_newspapers_citing_Web_of_Science_journals/4796548
<p>Citations from news
stories to scientific journals provide useful evidence about the dissemination
of research findings to the public. This paper introduces a citation-based
method to obtain information about news coverage of research on a large scale. ProQuest
was used to search for citations to 9,639 Science and 3,412 Social Science Web
of Science (WoS) journals from eight UK daily newspapers during 2006-2015 and an
automatic method was applied to extract citations to academic journals from the
full text of newspapers. Most Science (95%) and Social Science (94%) journals
were never cited by these newspapers. Half of the cited Science journals covered
medical or health-related topics, whereas 43% of the Social Sciences journals
were related to psychiatry or
psychology. A content analysis of the citing news stories found that the
method identifies mentions of journals in news stories with very high accuracy and
94% of the journals mentioned reported research findings. From the citing news
stories, 60% described research extensively and 53% used more than one source. There
were variations in the extent to which newspapers reported good or bad news and
most news stories had no comments about the quality of the reported research. Finally,
a small number of prestigious British journals were cited often. </p>