Academic Research Echoes in the Media: The Effect of Research Quality and Public Resonance

Abstract

This study aims to explore how the tension between research quality and public resonance helps to explain which academic publications get coverage in the news. When academics push out their research to the media, it is unclear why certain press releases lead to coverage in news outlets while others are not picked up at all. On the one hand, research quality – as signalled by the journal impact factor – may increase the likelihood that research captures journalists’ attention. On the other hand, journalists have an incentive to write about research that resonates with the public’s interests. However, high journal quality and high public resonance need not go together, which raises the question under what circumstances research can still generate media attention despite being published in lower impact journals. This study identifies various dimensions of public resonance and assesses how these dimensions may strengthen or weaken the importance of research quality as a signal. Analysing the media attention of academics in a major research-intensive university, this study finds that there is a substitution effect between the signal of research quality and the unexpectedness of the research content, and a complementarity effect between the research quality signal and contribution relevance of the research in explaining the media attention of academic articles.