Exploring the Relation between Press Releases and Media Coverage of Japanese University Research Outputs

Abstract

In recent years, the number of press releases from universities has generally increased over time. How academic research is reported in the media is a big concern for management at universities and for research on the diffusion of scientific knowledge. In this study, we investigate the current situation and analyze the relation between press releases and their coverage in two major national newspapers in terms of the source article’s altmetric attention score, citation, subject field, and collaboration network from 2011 to 2014. Introduction To chieve accountability and as one of the strategies to secure research funds and to increase university enrolment, the number of universities making an effort to publish press releases to announce research findings has grown rapidly in recent years, and the number of press releases related to top-tier universities in Japan has generally increased over time (Nishizawa and Sun, 2012). How academic research is reported in the media is a big concern for management of universities and for research on the diffusion of scientific knowledge. In our previous studies, we investigated the relation between university press releases and two major Japanese national newspapers from 2007 to 2012 (Nishizawa and Sun, 2014), and the relation between the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) (Altmetric, 2018) of the source article in press releases and coverage in newspapers in 2012. It has been shown that research published in journals with high Eigenfactor values tend to be announced in university press releases (Nishizawa and Sun, 2016), and the AAS of publications tends to have a positive correlation with instances of being featured in newspapers (Nishizawa and Sun, 2017). In this study, after updating the current situation of university press releases from 2005 to 2015, we identified each source article in press releases from 2011 to 2014 through their Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and investigated the relation between press releases and their coverage in two national newspapers, Mainichi Shimbun and Yomiuri Newspaper, in terms of their AAS score, citation counts, subject fields, and collaboration network.