Media Attention to Science

How has media attention to science changed over the past decade? Does media attention bring scientific attention too? To answer these questions, we collected media attention statistics from Altmetric.com for over 40,000 papers published in PNAS journal in the last 13 years. Our analysis reveals that (i) Media attention to science has slowly, but steadily increased over time, (ii) Media attention doesn't necessarily translate into scientific attention (citations) and, (iii) It is non-trivial to predict the amount of media attention a paper gets from attributes such as authors, author affiliations, abstract, and title.