Do novel papers attract more social attention?

The proliferation of social media and the increasing emphasis on societal impact on research evaluation have highlighted the importance of understanding how scientific novelty influences public engagement. This study examines how the novelty of scientific research correlates with the social attention it garners. The analysis is based on a dataset comprising over 310,000 articles in economics and business published from 2012 to 2019. We use Altmetrics—comprising the Altmetric Attention Score, Mendeley, Twitter, Blogs, News, Facebook, and Wikipedia—to evaluate the social attention received by both novel and non-novel papers as defined by us. The results show that novel research consistently garners greater social attention, with particularly strong effects observed in top-tier journals and open-access publications. Our findings remain robust even when employing alternative measures of novelty and controlling for the citation count. Further analysis comparing outcomes across various Altmetric sources provides a comprehensive view of how different platforms reflect societal engagement with novel research. This study provides valuable insights into the societal attention of novel and original scientific research, offering a new perspective for academic publishing and research evaluation.