News coverage of public health research: An exploratory study of topics, coverage, and open access status

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: This study aims to identify and analyze the news outlets that mention research published by a School of Public Health at a Midwestern university. We analyzed the overall patterns of news sources, including the content type and overall coverage, the correlation with open access (OA) status (both gold and green OA), and the topics that received the most attention in the news. Our results will contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of news outlets that disseminate public health information, and the types of research mentioned most often in the news.

METHODS: We conducted a bibliometric analysis of publications from authors affiliated with a School of Public Health over five years (2015-2019). The searches were conducted in December 2021. We queried Scopus using an affiliation search to identify and retrieve the publications. Then we queried Altmetric Explorer for all the citations from the Scopus search, using the identifiers and the titles to compile the altmetrics data and identify the titles mentioned in news outlets. We used Excel to aggregate, clean up and analyze the data, and VOSviewer software to generate the topic analysis and visualization map.

RESULTS: Between 2015 and 2019, 778 publications were published by the School of Public Health. A total of 144 (18.5%) were mentioned in 2,079 news stories from 643 news sources. We analyzed the overall dataset of news outlets according to the source and content type, subject area, and country of publication. We also determined whether OA articles were discussed more often in the news than subscription access articles. We also performed a co-occurrence analysis of the author and abstract keywords of the articles mentioned in news outlets.

CONCLUSIONS: Mentions of scholarly articles in news outlets can identify patterns and trends of attention and interest in research beyond academia. This poster analyzed the top news sources that mentioned the research generated by the faculty of a School of Public Health, and the OA status of articles that received mentioned in the news. These findings may support the decision-making of leaders of the school regarding future publication and research strategy development directions.