A scientometric-inspired framework to analyze EurekAlert! press releases

Abstract: Press releases about scholarly news are brief statements provided in advance to the press, including a description of the most relevant findings of one or more accepted scientific publications, usually under the condition that journalists will adhere to an embargo until the publication date. The existence of centralized platforms such as EurekAlert! allows press releases to be disseminated online as independent news articles. Press releases can include additional material (e.g., interviews, commentaries, explanatory tables, figures, media, recommended readings), which turn them into online objects with analytical value of their own. The objective of this work is to illustrate how press releases can be quantitatively analyzed applying similar tools and approaches as those applied in scientometric research (SCI). To achieve this goal, a scientometric inspired analytical framework is proposed based on the formulation of spaces of interaction of objects, actors, and impacts. As such, the framework proposed considers press releases as science communication (SCO) objects, produced by different SCO actors (e.g., journalists), and the subject of receiving impact (e.g., tweets, links). To carry out this analysis, all press releases published by EurekAlert! from 1996 until 2021 (455,703 press releases), all tweets including at least one URL referring to a EurekAlert! press release (1,364,563 tweets), and all webpages with at least one URL referring to a EurekAlert! press release (54,089,233 webpages) have been studied. We argue that the large volume of press releases published and their online dissemination make these objects relevant in the measurement of SCO-SCI interactions.