Making headlines: An analysis of US government-funded cancer research mentioned in online media

Maggio, Lauren A.; Ratcliff, Chelsea L.; Krakow, Melinda; Moorhead, Laura; Enkhbayar, Asura; Alperin, Juan Pablo

doi:10.1101/370973

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 29 publications

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“…Because Altmetric does not disambiguate between preprints and published versions for some preprint servers 6,7 and may thus erroneously include some mentions of peer reviewed research, we removed 3,547 mentions in news stories published after the peer reviewed version of the preprint was published, again using a five-day margin. While this approach may have removed some true mentions of preprints, these false removals are likely limited, as it is relatively uncommon for news stories to mention research outputs more than a few weeks after initial publication (Maggio et al, 2017). Finally, we removed an additional 1,021 duplicate news mentions (where the same preprint was mentioned in the same story more than once).…”

Section: Gathering News Mentions Of Preprint Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unreviewed science in the news: The evolution of preprint media coverage from 2014-2021

Fleerackers,

Shores,

Chtena

et al. 2023

Preprint

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It has been argued that preprint coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a paradigm shift in journalism norms and practices. This study examines whether, in what ways, and to what extent this is the case using a sample of 11,538 preprints posted on four preprint servers---bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and SSRN---that received coverage in 94 English-language media outlets between 2014--2021. We compared mentions of these preprints with mentions of a comparison sample of 397,446 peer reviewed research articles indexed in the Web of Science to identify changes in the share of media coverage that mentioned preprints before and during the pandemic. We found that preprint media coverage increased at a slow but steady rate pre-pandemic, then spiked dramatically. This increase applied only to COVID-19-related preprints, with minimal or no change in coverage of preprints on other topics. In addition, the rise in preprint coverage was most pronounced among health and medicine-focused media outlets, which barely covered preprints before the pandemic but mentioned more COVID-19 preprints than outlets focused on any other topic. These results suggest that the growth in coverage of preprints seen during the pandemic period may imply a shift in journalistic norms, including a changing outlook on reporting preliminary, unvetted research.

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Section: Gathering News Mentions Of Preprint Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%