Press releases shape online attention for neuroscience articles

ABSTRACT Alternative indexes (altmetrics), such as the number of social media posts or news mentions, assess the relevance of a publication beyond academia. At the same time, composite metrics, like Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), gather these indicators to provide an overall measure of the online attention of an article. Communication departments at research institutions aim to help publications reach the general public and, therefore, play a key role in improving the altmetrics performance of scientific articles. However, the most effective strategies to achieve this remain unclear. No standardized protocols exist to guide communication professionals in maximizing the impact of their outreach efforts. Thus, in the present research, carried out by the communication department of a neuroscience research center, we conducted three complementary analyses to help to fill this gap. First, a study involving more than 3,000 neuroscience publications from 8 similar research centers revealed correlations between altmetrics and citations. Second, a retrospective analysis of 201 in-house articles found that active communication campaigns were associated with better altmetric performance, with notable differences between publications that included a press release (PR) and those that did not. Finally, a prospective experiment involving 25 articles examined changes in altmetrics before and after the dissemination of a PR or posting on X. Results showed that PRs significantly increased the number of news mentions and X posts, leading to an average rise of approximately 70 points in the AAS. These findings highlight the importance of PRs in maximizing the societal visibility and impact of scientific publications.