Scientific clickbait: Examining media coverage and readability in genome-wide association research

In the first systematic text mining review of media coverage of genome-wide association studies, we retrieved all GWAS publications indexed by GWAS Catalog. Our review includes 3,555 GWAS publications on 1,943 different traits. We analyzed trends in media coverage, readability, themes, and mentions of ethical and social issues, in over 5,000 websites published from 2005 to 2018. We found that 22.9% of GWAS papers received media attention but most were described in language too complex to be understood by the public. Ethical issues are rarely mentioned, and mentions to translation are increasing over time. We predicted media attention based on year of publication, number of genetic associations identified, study sample size, and journal impact factor, using a regression model (r2 = 38.7%). We found that chronotype, educational attainment, alcohol and coffee consumption, sexual orientation, tanning and hair color received substantially more attention than predicted by the regression model. We also evaluated the prevalence of the clickbait “one gene, one disease” headline (e.g., “Scientists Say They’ve Found Gene That Causes Breast Cancer”) and found that it is decline. In addition, we developed a website where all results described below can be explored interactively: https://jjmorosoli.shinyapps.io/newas/.