Old-School Press Releases Still Beat Social Media For Science News

Press Releases Massively Outperform Social Media at Getting Science Noticed

When a brain research center in Spain wanted to know whether their communications team was actually making a difference, they ran a controlled experiment. What they found should change how universities and research centers think about getting their science noticed.

A new study published in the journal Scientometrics examined 201 neuroscience articles from the Institut de Neurociències de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona to see whether active communication efforts, specifically press releases and social media posts on X (formerly Twitter), affected how much online attention those articles received. Across both a historical review of past publications and a forward-looking experiment with 25 articles, the pattern was consistent: press releases were the communication tool associated with by far the largest jump in media coverage. Social media posts, on their own, barely moved the needle.

For researchers who spend years producing scientific work that may never reach the public, and for universities spending money on communications teams without knowing what actually works, this study offers some of the clearest evidence yet on what matters most.

Press Releases Drove Nearly 100 Times More News Coverage Than Silence

Researchers from the communications department of a neuroscience center at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona split their analysis into two phases. First, they looked back at 201 published articles from their center spanning 2016 to 2021. Each article fell into one of two groups: those for which the communications team had issued a press release (28 articles) and those for which it had not (173 articles). Using an online tracking tool called Altmetric, which counts how often articles are mentioned in news stories, social media posts, and other online spaces, they measured the difference in attention between the two groups.

Articles that had a press release received almost seven news mentions on average, according to Altmetric data. Articles without one received fewer than 0.1. Press release articles also had a mean Altmetric Attention Score of 76.3, compared to 4.58 for articles without one. This advantage held across journals of varying prestige, which suggests that publishing in a high-profile outlet alone is not enough to guarantee public attention.

To dig into a central question, whether press releases cause more attention or simply tend to be written for studies that were already going to attract interest, the team ran a follow-up experiment during 2022 and 2023. For 25 newly published articles, researchers decided in advance which ones would receive a press release and which would not, based on factors including how newsworthy the article seemed and the preferences of the researchers involved. Then they tracked each article’s attention levels before and after its campaign began, using the article as its own baseline for comparison.

News Mentions Appeared Within Hours of Each Press Release

Among the articles that received a press release, news mentions began appearing within hours of the release going out. Articles without one received zero news coverage during the same window. Within one week, articles accompanied by a press release and social media promotion averaged 21.6 news mentions per article; those with only a press release but no social media push averaged 15. Articles with no press release received none.

Two articles in high-prestige journals illustrated the gap. One had a press release and social media promotion. Within the first week, it was mentioned 28 times in news outlets and 315 times on X, reaching an Altmetric score of 219. Another article, in a comparable journal but with no campaign, gained only 1 point over three full months.

Social media posts on X, when used alone, made almost no difference. That held true in both parts of the study.

A Key Measurement Tool Is Missing the Full Picture

Beyond the communications findings, the study raised concerns about a widely used measurement platform. Altmetric, which aggregates online mentions of scientific articles into a single score, missed a substantial share of real-world coverage. Using Google searches to manually verify coverage, the researchers found that Altmetric failed to detect 63% of news mentions for articles that had received a press release, largely because Altmetric’s tracking system favors English-language sources, and much of the missed coverage appeared in Spanish and Catalan outlets.

Timing also turned out to be more flexible than expected, within the bounds of this study’s setup. While some prior research had suggested that press releases issued more than a day after publication lose effectiveness, this study found that once the very first few days after publication had passed, delaying the release further did not appear to significantly reduce coverage in this dataset. That flexibility had a limit, since EurekAlert!, one of the main platforms used to post releases, only accepts material from articles published within the last 90 days.

For anyone running a lab, a university communications office, or a science nonprofit, the lesson is simple: a well-written press release still beats a stack of tweets.

---