Attention boost through media coverage? Agenda setting effects from news media coverage on topic selection of scientific journals

The fact that media emphasis of certain topics can increase their importance for the public has already been confirmed many times in agenda setting research. However, we are not aware of any study that examines if attention by news media on certain scientific topics correlates with or even has feedback effects on topic salience in scientific journals. The aim of our analysis is to examine how a scientific topic develops in scientific journals over time, namely before and after a point of conspicuous news media attention. Our analyses reveal a relationship between the amount of attention scientific papers receive through popular media and the amount of attention the respective topics receive from scientific journals. In more than 50 percent of the cases, after a scientific paper received a noticeable amount of news media coverage, more thematically similar articles were published in scientific journals than before. In this sense, here and there journalism can be considered as an agenda setter for the choice of topics in academic journals. Our findings may be interpreted in accordance to a publicity effect, namely that popular media coverage provides a scientific attention boost for scientific studies or topics that they would not have received without news media coverage.