The impact of being selected as a cover paper: Evidence from high-impact materials science journals

In the era of print reading, being selected as a cover paper holds a crucial role in attracting greater attention and bolstering academic influence. It is important to assess its effect on scholarly attention and academic influence, particularly in light of the evolving reading habits among researchers. In this study, we empirically estimate the impact of ‘being selected as a cover paper’ on scholarly online attention (proxied by altmetric score) and academic influence (measured by citation counts). This analysis is based on a data set comprising 25,238 papers selected from 10 high-impact materials science journals (with journal impact factors exceeding 10) published between 2016 and 2020. Our findings indicate a positive correlation between ‘being selected as a cover paper’ and scholarly online attention, while its impact on academic influence is insignificant. Our results remain robust even when excluding the top 1% mostly cited papers, employing the negative binomial model and considering various time windows for estimation. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the impact of ‘being selected as a cover paper’ on scholarly online attention holds across nearly all topics, consistent with the baseline result. In addition, online platforms, such as Twitter and News outlets, exhibit a higher frequency of sharing research featured as cover papers. We offer suggestive evidence that ‘being selected as a cover paper’ is not solely contingent on its quality. These findings contribute to the development of a precise, dynamic and multi-dimensional evaluation framework, crucial for navigating the revolution of science communication.