Zagovora Olga; presentation at 23rd International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI 2018) in Leiden, the Netherlands.

1. What increases (social) media attention:
Research impact, author prominence or title
attractiveness?
Olga Zagovora
Olga Zagovora, Katrin Weller, Milan Janosov,
Claudia Wagner and Isabella Peters
1

2. Factors affecting
Number of citations
 “Paper related factors’’
 quality of paper
 novelty and interest of subject
 characteristics of fields and study topics
 methodology
 document type
 study design
 characteristics of results and discussion
 use of figures and appendix
 characteristics of the titles and abstracts
 characteristics of references
 length of paper
 age of paper
 early citation and speed of citation
 accessibility and visibility of papers
 ‘‘Journal related factors’’
 journal impact factor
 language of journal
 scope of journal
 form of publication
 ‘‘Author(s) related factors’’
 number of authors
 author’s reputation
 author’s academic rank,
 author’s productivity
 international and national collaboration of authors
 authors’ country, gender, age and race
 organizational features and funding
 self-citations
(Social) media mentions
 Number of citations
 ...
 title length (Zahedi &
Haustein, 2018)
 title amusement level
(Subotik & Mukherjee,
2014)
 Media popularity of topic
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3. What matters for (social) media attention?
 # citations
 Discipline
 Publication year
 Affiliation
 @rank
 Country
 @GDP on edu
 Collaboration net
 @PageRank
 Length
 # char, # words, #:
 Sentiment
 Polarity
 Subjectivity
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Research impact Author prominence Title attractiveness

4. Research Questions
 Which features of publications are associated
with increased (social) media attention?
 RQ1: What are the most effective factors?
 RQ2: Which discipline-specific differences exist
between those features?
 RQ3: Are the same types of publications popular
across different media channels?
(Social) media attention: Wikipedia, Facebook, News,
Twitter; Altmetric score [see also Altmetric.com]
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5. 5

6. Datasets
Publications
 Multidisciplinary journal; control
for disciplines
 High impact journals;
comparable papers in terms of
quality
Selected Journals:
 PNAS 2004-2017
 Nature Communications (NC)
2010-2017
Additional data
 Web of Science (as of 07.12.2017)
 DOI, Publication year, Title, Full
author names, Citation counts
 PNAS website
 Field of Science
 Springer Nature SciGraph Data
Explorer
 Field of Science
 Altmetric.com (till 07.12.2017)
 Altmetric score
 Wikipedia
 Twitter
 Facebook
 News
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Discipline (OECD) PNAS NC
Agricultural sciences 221 62
Engineering & Technology 1 133 2 482
(Humanities) (0) (35)
Medical & Health sciences 12 813 2 649
Natural sciences 27 994 10 410
Social sciences 1 810 245
Total 43 921 15 883

7. Modified variables
 Citation counts normalization by year &
discipline
 Log transformation by Thelwall (2017); MNLCS

ln(1+𝑥 𝑖)
1
𝑛 𝑗=1
𝑛
ln(1+𝑥 𝑗)
, where 𝑥𝑖- citation count and 𝑥𝑗 is from the same
discipline and year as 𝑥𝑖.
 Altmetric score normalization by year &
discipline
 Normalized Log-transformed Altmetric Score (NLAS)
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8. Regression models
Dependent var.
 Media attention metrics:
 Altmetric score, log-
transformed normed (NLAS)
 # Wikipedia articles
 # News stories
 # tweets
 # Facebook posts
Independent var.
 Research impact
 Citations counts, log-
transformed normed
(MNLCS)
 Year of publication
 Author prominence
 First author PageRank
 Last author PageRank
 Title attractiveness
 Length
 Title chunks “:”
 Sentiment:
 Polarity
 Subjectivity
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9. Research impact
MNLCS
 Higher impact papers
1.
2.
3.
4.
Recency
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10. Click to add Title – but what??
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What matters? Nature Communication PNAS
Short titles all all
„:“ Wikipedia
Altmetric score
(e.g., Natural sciences)
1.Twitter
2. News
3. Facebook
Positive sentiment Altmetric score
(e.g., Natural sciences)
1. Twitter
2. News
-
Objective Altmetric score Altmetric score
(e.g., Natural sciences)
1. Twitter
2. News
3. Facebook

11. Co-authorship network and PageRank
11
10 papers in PNAS
14 coauthors
1 paper in PNAS
4 coauthors
1 paper in PNAS
0 coauthors
Olya JohnProf. Frink
High page rank Low page rank Lowest page rank

12. First author
12
10 papers in PNAS
14 coauthors
1 paper in PNAS
4 coauthors
1 paper in PNAS
0 coauthors
Olya JohnProf. Frink
High page rank Low page rank Lowest page rank
No significant relations
BUT :
 PNAS Medical & Health
Sciences

13. Last author
13
11 papers in PNAS
15 coauthors
2 papers in PNAS
5 coauthors
1 paper in PNAS
4 coauthors
Olya JohnProf. Frink
High page rank Low page rank Lowest page rank

14. Last author
14
11 papers in PNAS
15 coauthors
2 papers in PNAS
5 coauthors
1 paper in PNAS
4 coauthors
Olya JohnProf. Frink
High page rank Low page rank Lowest page rank
PNAS Journal:
 Altmetric score
 overall
 in Social, Medical & Health
sciences
 News
 Twitter
 Facebook
Nature Communications:
 Facebook

15. Summary
 Features associated with increased (social) media attention:
 Articles with shorter titles are more likely to appear in media
 Polarity of title matters for
 Twitter attention to NC papers – Positive
 New collaborations attract media attention
 News, Twitter, Facebook
 Journals inconsistencies
 What’s next?
 Supplement feature list with
 Authors' academic age and productivity level
 Google trends of topics
 Effect size comparison
 Causality

16. Thank you!
Olga Zagovora
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