Citation pattern of newsworthy research articles

Popular science magazines cover research articles published in scholarly journals that the magazines perceive as having news value. Despite thousands of research articles being published in research journals, a very few get identified for coverage in popular science magazines, general magazines, and newspapers. Do research articles published in journals that are covered in popular science magazines receive higher citations? We hypothesize that newsworthy articles should receive higher citations as the newsworthiness can be a reflection of higher research value of the articles and also because of the visibility received by the articles owing to its coverage in popular science magazine. To empirically study the citedness, we identified 193 research articles and that were reported in New Scientist magazine in 2001. The characteristics of these articles including the citations received following coverage in New Scientist in 2001 were looked at. It was found that average citations per paper of articles covered in New Scientist was higher than the journal average for the year 2001 for 19 out of the 24 journals identified here.