What Makes A Research Article Newsworthy?

Abstract

There has been tremendous growth in the amount of scientific literature being published every year. Yet, very little of it receives press coverage. Mentions by news outlets often establish the relevance the research has to society in general. In the present study, we focused on better understanding the factors that contribute to a research article's newsworthiness. We have built three classifiers to predict the likelihood of research article receiving online press coverage, based on features that quantify the attention it has received on various online platforms. The Random Forest classifier performed best with an accuracy rate of 0.92.