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Public Health Research in the News: An Exploratory Study of Topics,
Coverage, and Open Access Status

Mirian Ramirez, MLISa, Rachel J. Hinrichs MS, MSLSb,

aResearch Metrics Librarian, Ruth Lilly Medical Librarian, Indiana University School of
Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana, https://www.orcid.org/0000-0002-6233-7480 ,
mirirami@iu.edu

bHealth Sciences Librarian, University Library, Indiana University, Indianapolis, Indiana,
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0762-744X , rhinrich@iu.edu

Cite as: Ramirez M, Hinrichs RJ. Public Health Research in the News: An Exploratory Study
of Topics, Coverage, and Open Access Status. Hypothesis. 2024;36(1). doi:10.18060/27264

Ramirez, Hinrichs. All works in Hypothesis are licensed under a CC BY-NC
4.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. Authors own copyright of their
articles appearing in Hypothesis. Readers may copy articles without permission of the
copyright owner(s), as long as the author(s) are acknowledged in the copy, and the copy is
used for educational, not-for-profit purposes. For any other use of articles, please contact the
copyright owner(s).

1

https://www.orcid.org/0000-0002-6233-7480
https://orcid.org/
mailto:mirirami@iu.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0762-744X
https://orcid.org/
mailto:rhinrich@iu.edu
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

Abstract

Objectives: This study aims to identify and analyze the news outlets that reference research
published by the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis (FSPH). We analyzed the overall patterns of news sources, including
the content type and overall coverage, the correlation with open access (OA) status, and the
topics that received more attention in online news stories. We aim to contribute to a better
understanding of the characteristics of news outlets that disseminate public health
information, and the types of public health research referenced most often in the news.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study. The study population consisted of
FSPH authors, the exposure was publishing journal articles by FSPH authors, and the
outcome was news media attention. We compared the amount of media attention with other
studies. We also compared open access journals versus commercially produced journals. We
searched the Scopus database using an affiliation search to locate and retrieve the journal
articles. Then we queried the Altmetric Explorer tool (altmetrics provider) for all the citations
resulting from the Scopus search. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of publications from
authors affiliated with the school of public health over five years (2015–2019). The searches
were conducted in December 2021. We used the identifiers and the titles to compile the online
news mention data and identify the titles featured in news outlets. The journal articles with
news mentions and the news outlets that reference them were analyzed. The data were
combined, cleaned up, and analyzed using Excel, and the subject analysis was produced using
the VOSviewer software.

Results: For the 2015–2019 time frame, 778 publications were published by the FSPH. A
total of 144 (18.5%) were highlighted in 2,079 online news stories from 655 news outlets. We
analyzed the overall dataset of news outlets according to the source, content type, subject
area, and country of publication. We also determined the attention likelihood of open access
articles compared to those with closed access. We performed a co-occurrence analysis of the
MeSH terms the articles featured in news outlets.

Discussion: Mentions in online news outlets can identify patterns and trends of attention and
interest in research beyond academia. This bibliometric analysis helps to clarify the media
outlets that distribute information on public health as well as the categories of research that
are frequently featured in the media. The findings of this report, will help the library expand
its research impact services and support the decision-making of leaders of public health
schools for future publication and research strategy development directions.

Purpose and Background
Alternative impact indicators (or altmetrics) provide quantitative and qualitative data that
highlight online attention (e.g., social media coverage, mentions in news stories, citations on
Wikipedia) and influence of scholarly outputs. Altmetrics offer opportunities and advantages
over traditional citation metrics for assessing impact, especially for measuring the societal
impact of research and public engagement with scholarly work1. In particular, news
media-based altmetrics (mentions in news) can demonstrate the reach and attention the
research received beyond academia, especially if it has a specialized subject focus or covers a

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

wide geographical area1–4. For medical and health sciences research, mass-circulation news
sources offer a way to connect with and interact with a wide audience as part of knowledge
translation and dissemination processes5.

In this analysis, we look at the characteristics of the online news sources that covered research
conducted by the researchers of the IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (FSPH) as well as the open access status
of the articles that were referenced in the news. The results of this study can help public
health school leaders make decisions about future publication, knowledge translation,
dissemination, and research strategy directions.

Several studies address online media attention, including blogs, social media, and others, to
evaluate the degree of correlation of mentions or Altmetric scores with the number of
citations in various health sciences specialties6–12 or general scientific journals13. Using
bibliometrics and altmetric analysis, more studies have investigated the connection between
citations and altmetric indicators. Dumas-Mallet et al14. analyzed the impact of English
newspaper coverage from 6 countries on the citation counts of biomedical studies published in
38 different peer-reviewed journals with Impact Factors (ranging from JIF 5 to 51). Their
findings evidence a positive association between newspaper coverage and the citation count of
a scientific paper. Further, Palamar & Strain7 analyzed traditional and social media coverage
of manuscripts focusing on substance use and found that news and social media coverage
were positively associated with a number of downloads and citations. According to their
results, 13.9% of the articles were featured in news sources, with epidemiology papers
receiving the most coverage.

Few studies have focused on the characteristics of the news sources that highlight research
articles in mass media. One example is a paper by Moorhead et al. that analyzed the
characteristics of news sources featuring cancer research16. In this study, the authors reviewed
cancer research articles mentioned in the news and classified the news sources as either top
traditional news sites or top digital-native sites. Their findings reveal that 1.88% of journal
articles received at least one online news mention (totaling 642 mentions across 213 journal
articles) and were cited by conventional news outlets much more frequently than
digital-native and niche publications. According to the authors, the results suggest that
prominent online news media outlets continue to under-represent research that focuses on
cancer prevention and detection.

Open versus paywalled access to research articles may play a role in whether an article is
mentioned in the news. There are several types of open access articles. Gold open access
means that the journal provides immediate open access to all its articles and may sometimes
charge a fee to the authors17. Green open access, on the other hand, means that a version of
the publication is archived online, such as in a repository, while the final, published version of
the article may or may not be open access17. Hybrid Gold open access articles are published
in paywalled journals, but the authors pay a fee to make their article open access17. The
literature has extensively discussed the citation advantage of open access publications over
paywalled articles. According to a study by Dehdarirad and Didegah13, the likelihood that a
paper will be shared on social media is significantly correlated with its open access status.
They compared the social media exposure of open access versus non-open access, and Gold
against other types of open access articles in the life sciences and biomedicine fields. Their

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

findings demonstrated that open access was strongly associated with a higher likelihood of a
paper being mentioned on the analyzed social media platforms and that the percentage of
open access papers mentioned on altmetric platforms was higher than that of non-open access
articles. The open access articles had a greater average number of tweets, Facebook postings,
news posts, and blog posts compared to non-open access items. Further, Vadhera et al.18

found that open access publications published in orthopedic journals obtained noticeably
more citations and social and news media attention than subscription-based studies. Schultz19

investigated how much coverage open access scholarly articles from different disciplines get
in the news media. The author found evidence that there is a positive correlation between the
use of Gold, Green, and Hybrid open access over paywalled articles; articles focusing on
health received more news mentions after general sciences subject articles. It should be noted
that In the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Open Access policy20 plays a
significant role in influencing the visibility and impact of research articles. Any publication
resulting from the NIH-funded research is required to be made freely and publicly accessible
through PubMed Central within a year of the official publication date.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no analysis of news media attention specific to a school
of public health, which publishes a variety of research across public health domains.
Therefore, this study aims to identify and analyze the news outlets that mentioned research
published between 2015 and 2019 by the IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (FSPH) to answer the following research
questions:

1. How many articles published by the FSPH are mentioned in news stories?

2. What are the characteristics of news sources that mention the FSPH’s public health
research articles (type of news source, subject area, geographical scope, language of
origin)?

3. What research topics covered by the FSPH’s articles are most likely to be mentioned in
news sources?

4. Are open access articles published by FSPH more likely to be referenced in news
sources compared to those with paywalled access?

To answer these questions, we conducted a retrospective cohort study that employed
bibliometric analysis to identify the overall patterns of the news sources that reference or
mention the articles: type of news outlet, country of publication, language, geographical
coverage, and subject area. We also determined whether Gold or Hybrid Gold open access
scholarly articles were discussed more often in the news than subscription-access articles. Our
results will contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of news outlets that
disseminate public health information and the types of research mentioned most often in the
news.

Methods and Materials
We conducted a retrospective cohort study. The population consisted of FSPH authors, the
exposure was publishing journal articles, and the outcome was news media attention. We
compared the amount of news media attention with other studies. We also compared open
access journals versus subscription journals. We conducted a bibliometric analysis, with a

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

focus on altmetrics (or alternative metrics), of publications from authors affiliated with the
FSPH over five years (2015-2019). We chose to analyze news articles published prior to the
COVID-19 pandemic as we suspected that the content of the research articles, open access
status, and quantity of news mentions would likely change after 2020, and we wanted to
establish a baseline. The data in this paper does not involve human subjects and is exempt
from IRB approval.

Data collection

Publications by researchers affiliated with the FSPH over five years (2015-2019) were
retrieved as raw .CSV data files from the Scopus database, which lists all authors’ full
addresses. While Scopus relies on various sources for indexing data and covers a wide range
of disciplines and publications, it does not comprehensively index all relevant journals and
publications in all fields. To collect the data, we queried the Scopus database to find
documents authored by researchers affiliated with the FSPH; we developed an advanced
search string using the affiliation field to catch variations of the School’s name in the
affiliations used by the authors of the publications. Queries were made using the advanced
search option using the AFFIL() search field code and restricted to the timeframe covered in
the study: AFFIL("Fairbanks School of Public Health" OR "Fairbanks School of Health")
AND (LIMIT-TO(PUBYEAR , 2019 ) OR LIMIT-TO(PUBYEAR, 2018) OR
LIMIT-TO(PUBYEAR, 2017) OR LIMIT-TO(PUBYEAR, 2016) OR LIMIT-TO (PUBYEAR,
2015)). The data was downloaded in December 2021.

To identify the articles mentioned in news outlets, we used the Altmetric Explorer for
Academic Librarians (https://www.altmetric.com/explorer/login), using the scholarly
identifiers, DOIs, and PubMed IDs available for all the publications collected in Scopus. The
Altmetric Explorer (Academic Librarians version) tool (https://www.altmetric.com) serve as
an altmetric data aggregator that tracks mentions of research outputs using scholarly
identifiers (e.g., DOIs, PubMed IDs) of over 4,000 online news and mainstream media outlets
around the world21.

We used the Import.io (https://www.import.io/) web tool (trial version), which extracts online
data from websites, to extract the news that references the articles from the Altmetric.com
details page (Image 1) for each article that identified news mentions. The data collected
included the following fields: Source Name, News URL, News headline/title, Date, and
Altmetric.com URL details page. Data was exported to Excel spreadsheets and further
aggregated to generate a list of unique news sources.

To determine the articles’ open access status, we used the data provided by Scopus on Open
Access status and the UnPaywall tool22. We identified articles that were either Gold or Hybrid
Gold open access articles, which means that the article would be open access at the time of
publication. Green open access articles are made publicly accessible by archiving a copy of
the article in a repository. However, there was no way for us to tell when the article had been
deposited, so we could not be sure that the article was openly available when the news media
were accessing it.

5

https://www.altmetric.com/explorer/login
https://www.altmetric.com
https://www.import.io/


Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

Image 1. Overview of the details page showcasing newscoverage tracked by Altmetric.com
https://www.altmetric.com/details/4768439/news

Data Analysis

The analysis was based on the data from documents identified on Altmetric.com using
scholarly identifiers. To ensure the authors’ inclusion in the analysis, we examined the articles
referenced in the news sources to double-check the authors’ institutional affiliation. One of
the major tasks in the data analysis was to tag all the identified news sources with the various
categories we created. To categorize and code the news sources, we created categories (Table
1) that could group the type of news outlet, geographical scope, and subject area. To gather
information we primarily rely on Wikipedia entries related to news sources as they often
contain detailed descriptions of various media outlets present in our dataset.) Additionally we
used the online Ulrichsweb serials directory (https://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com/) to
check information on the source. We coded each news source primarily using the descriptions
of the sources found in the "about" section of the websites. The serial type was determined by
the descriptions from the websites mentioned previously. The geographical scope was
obtained mainly from the description of the source. The subject area was determined by
analyzing the source’s main point of interest. The language was identified by navigating to the
source’s website or reading the description (usually found under ’About’) provided then on its
website; we used the ISO 639.22323 language names for coding the sources. The list of news
sources was examined by both researchers, who noted any discrepancies and attempted to
reconcile them.

Table 1. Categories were created for coding news sources: Serial type, Geographical scope,
and Subject area

6

https://www.altmetric.com/details/4768439/news
https://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com/


Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

Serial Type Geographical Scope Subject Area
News website Local/city Arts, culture, and entertain-

ment
Online magazine State Business & Economics
Online newspaper Regional Consumer health
Radio National General Interest/mass circu-

lation newspapers
Scholarly journal International
Trade journal Politics
Website Public health
health policy

Science
Technology

To create the topic analysis of the articles referenced in the news, we queried the PubMed
database to find and collect the MeSH terms of the articles. Full PubMed records were
exported to VOSviewer software (version 1.6.17) to run the MeSH term co-occurrence
analysis. The results of the term co-occurrence analysis were synthesized in a chart with
topics hierarchically structured, using the RawGraphs online tool (version 2.0). To generate
the topic co-occurrence analysis, the following MeSH categories were excluded: gender
(female, male), organisms (humans, animals), and geographic-related terms (countries,
regions).

We used a chi-square test to determine if there was a significant association between Gold or
Hybrid Gold open access status and news mentions. P < 0.05 was considered as significant.

Results
Mentions in news outlets

Overall, a total of 778 articles were published by the FSPH during 2015-2019 (Figure 1). We
identified a total of 144 (18.5%) documents that were referenced in 2,079 news articles from
643 news outlets (until the day of final search and extraction, December 2021). For articles
referenced in the news, on average, each document was mentioned 14 times; 99 articles were
mentioned more than once. Among the top journals with the most articles mentioned in news
stories with (greater than or equal to 100 mentions) are: Circulation, Nature Genetics, JAMA
Network Open, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, and Alzheimer’s and Dementia
(Table 2). Yahoo/Yahoo News is the news source that mentioned the most articles (Table 3),
with 78 news stories identified.

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

Figure 1: Distribution of articles published for the period 2015–2019: comparison of the 778
documents published vs. the 144 (18.5%) documents mentioned in the news.

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

Table 2. Top 20 journals publishing the most mentioned articles, published by the FSPH, in
the news.

Journal Title Number of Number of Citation
mentions in
news

articles count

Circulation 255(12.2%) 2 133
Nature Genetics 203 (9.7%) 6 834
JAMA Network Open 169 (8.1%) 1 33
New England Journal of Medicine 129 (6.2%) 3 379
Nature 127 (6.1%) 2 396
Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Trans-
lational Research and Clinical
Interventions

100 (4.8%) 1 58

Radiology 68 (3.2%) 1 20
Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers
and Prevention

61 (2.9%) 1 13

Nature Communications 61 (2.9%) 7 548
Hepatology 57 (2.7%) 1 20
JAMA - Journal of the American
Medical Association

52 (2.5%) 2 142

American Journal of Industrial
Medicine

48 (2.3%) 1 5

Journal of Infectious Diseases 47 (2.2%) 1 61
mBio 45 (2.1%) 1 63
Hypertension 45 (2.1%) 1 98
Environmental Health: A Global
Access Science Source

39 (1.8%) 1 69

Sexual Health 39 (1.8%) 1 45
American Journal of Clinical Nu-
trition

39 (1.8%) 2 94

Journal of the American Medical
Informatics Association

38 (1.8%) 8 196

JAMA Pediatrics 24 (1.1%) 2 69

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

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10



Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

News Sources Characteristics

The news sources vary by serial type, subject area, geographical scope, and language. Most of
the news sources identified are news websites, followed by web versions of general
interest/mass-circulation newspapers, mainly with a national geographical scope. Over half of
the news sources fall under the "news websites" or "online newspapers" categories (Figure 2).
We also identified that specialized news sources focusing on medicine, science technology,
consumer health, and public health health policy perspectives represent 26% of the news
sources, which is considerably low compared to those with general interest or mass
circulation types at 62% (Figure 3). The percentage of trade journals, scholarly journals, and
online magazines referencing the articles represents 16% of the news sources. The most
common geographical scope of the news sources is national (44%), followed by international
scope (Figure 4). The country of origin of the news sources includes the United States, the
United Kingdom, Australia, and India, and 81.03% corresponding to English-only sources,
4.04% to multiple languages (including English), and near 15% to a non-English language
source (Figure 5 and Table 4).

Figure 2: Distribution of news sources by type

11



Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

Figure 3: Distribution of news sources by subject area

Figure 4: Distribution of news sources by geographical scope of news sources

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

Table 4. Distribution of news sources by language

Language Total news
sources

Percentage

English 521 81.03%
Multiple languages 26 4.04%
German 20 3.11%
French 14 2.18%
Italian 12 1.87%
Spanish 12 1.87%
Dutch 7 1.09%
Portuguese 7 1.09%
Russian 4 0.62%
Chinese 4 0.62%
Swedish 3 0.47%
Hungarian 2 0.31%
Finnish 2 0.31%
Norwegian 2 0.31%
Greek 2 0.31%
Polish 1 0.16%
Japanese 1 0.16%
Danish 1 0.16%
Arabic 1 0.16%
Hindi 1 0.16%
Grand Total 643 100.00%

Topics of FSPH articles mentioned in news

The identified research papers mentioned in the news covered a wide range of topics. The
data in Figure 6 represents the nodes of MeSH terms with equal or greater than 8
co-occurrences in articles mentioned in news sources. We grouped the nodes in a hierarchical
structure classified by broader MeSH categories: Diseases, Phenomena and Processes,
Epidemiological Methods, and Age Groups. The size of the nodes is given by the number of
co-occurrences of the MeSH terms assigned to the articles featured in the news. The most
common topics of articles referenced in the news were Genome-wide Association Study,
Genetic Predisposition to Disease, Risk Factors, and Skin Neoplasms; and within age groups,
Middle Age and Adults were mostly assigned.

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

Figure 7: Distribution of articles mentioned in news according to Gold/Hybrid and Gold open
access status

Open access status of articles published by the FSPH with number of news mentions

Overall, 202 documents (26%) out of 778 have Gold or Hybrid Gold open access status. Only
32 (15.8%) of the open access articles were featured in the news, whereas 112 (19.4%) of the
paywalled articles were mentioned (Figure 7). Using a chi-square test, we found no
significant association between Gold/Hybrid Gold open access status and being mentioned in
the news (n = 778; X = 1.29, df = 1, p = .26).

Discussion
We found that 18.5% of articles published by the FSPH from 2015-2019 were referenced in
the news. This percentage is in line with many prior studies examining the rates of media
coverage of scholarly literature, ranging from 13.9% to 17%19,24,25. Many of those same
studies used different criteria for identifying research articles, such as high impact journals19,
a sample of cancer research articles selected from the Medline database25, or United States
government-funded research16,24. Our study, on the other hand, focused on the research output
of one school of public health, which produces a wide range of public health research in areas
such as health policy, health services, environmental health, epidemiology, genomics, and
behavioral health. That our percentage of articles mentioned in the news is similar could
mean that faculty from the FSPH publish in high impact journals, have government funding,
or are writing on topics that generate media interest. Based on the topic analysis of research
highlighted in the news, the most common MeSH categories were epidemiologic methods and
certain diseases, skin neoplasms being the most prominent. This finding is in line with other
studies that found that epidemiological studies gain more news mentions than
non-epidemiology studies18,19, and that melanoma, a type of skin cancer, is the third most
mentioned cancer type in the news16.

We also found that the FSPH’s research was most likely to be mentioned in general interest

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Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

news websites with a national United States-focused coverage. Our category of news website
refers to digital native news sources as opposed to traditional newspapers that have an online
version such as New York Times or Wall Street Journal. The fact that news websites have
overtaken online newspapers in our study as the dominant reporter of public health news
suggests that researchers should be open to targeting online news organizations rather than
focusing only on traditional newspapers. These online news organizations may be curating
their content to specific groups, and so could be more likely to report on certain public health
topics. For example, while 62% of the news sources were “general interest,” the remaining
38% of news sources reported on niche areas such as medicine (12%), science & technology
(8%), business and economics (6%), and even arts, culture, and entertainment (3%). While
most articles were discussed in English-language news sources, 20% were discussed in
non-English or multi-language news sources. Using news sources to demonstrate reach to a
large, mass-interest audience or a smaller niche-audience could be beneficial to a researcher
or public health school in determining research attention and impact.

While national news sources were the most common in this study (44%), local news sources
should not be overlooked when it comes to public health. We found that 18% and 13% of
news sources covered local/city and state news, respectively. When considering research
dissemination, audience size is important, but may not take into account local community
health needs or demographics that may be more interested in certain types of research16. A
Pew Research Center study found that older Americans, Black adults, and those with a high
school education or less are more likely to be interested in local news26. Community health
coalitions and public health practitioners working with nonprofit organizations or small local
health departments may have limited access to paywalled research27, and could benefit from
learning about new research from local news sources, especially if the research has local
implications. Future studies could consider what public health news is considered of local
importance, and how local newspapers select and curate the health research news they
include.

A surprising finding of our study was that open access articles were not more likely to be
mentioned than paywalled articles. This finding contrasts with many other studies that found
that open access studies have higher mentions in the news and social media18,19,28. Our study
may not have had a big enough sample size to detect a difference. Another reason could be
that we only counted gold and hybrid gold studies as open access because we knew they
would be open access at the time of publication. Many of the studies that we labeled as
paywalled could have been available through green open access methods such as a deposit in
an institutional repository or PubMed Central at the time of the news mention, but there was
no way for us to determine that. In her analysis, Schultz found that while green and hybrid
open access articles together comprised 6.4% of her sample, they represented 23.3% of the
articles with news mentions, whereas gold open access articles were 66.6% of the sample, but
only represented 53.8% of the news mentions19. If green open access plays an important role
in providing access to scientific articles for the news media, our study may have
underestimated the association between open access and news mentions.

In addition to this potential underestimation between open access and news mentions, our
study had several other limitations. First, our study only included research from one school of
public health rather than sampling from published public health articles. This means our
results cannot be generalized to other public health schools or public health research in

17



Peer Reviewed Article Hypothesis, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024

general. However, it does demonstrate a replicable method for other schools of public health
to track media attention to their own research. Second, it is possible that we could have
misclassified a news source, as it was sometimes difficult to determine the geographical scope
of coverage, and the difference between a news website and online newspaper. Third, while
Almetric.com has been found to have a high precision and acceptable recall for news
mentions, it may have missed some news mentions that do not link to the research articles,
mention the author or journal, or are in non-English media29. Because of this, our estimate of
18.5% news coverage may be conservative.

Conclusion
The results of this retrospective cohort study provide an overview of the patterns and trends of
attention and interest in research beyond academia of articles published by a school of public
health. This bibliometric analysis contributes to a better understanding of news outlets that
disseminate public health information and the types of research mentioned most often in the
news. This study’s insights are valuable for expanding the library’s research impact services
by developing a pilot school-level report based on altmetrics for internal research departments
and for schools of public health interested in tracking news mentions to their published
research.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Altmetric.com for allowing them access to their data through
the Altmetric Explorer for Academic Librarians for this study.

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