Are you wondering if it is okay to use news articles for literature review in a research paper? The answer is yes, but with great caution. News sources can provide information that academic sources cannot or that will take a long time to reach academic sources. For example, news sources are great for understanding people's reactions, opinions, and attitudes around the timing of an event. There are many ways to research your topic online, using tools from search engines and major news websites. This effect was not seen in the articles the New York Times covered, suggesting that the coverage encouraged future citations, and not just that the New York Times chose to cover more influential articles.
The authors found that articles in the New England Journal of Medicine covered by the New York Times received 72.8% more citations than articles that were not covered a year after publication. Some sources are great for breaking news, others are great for aggregated (or compiled) news, and others are great for historical news. This allows for the reproduction of limited portions of text and illustrations at the individual article level, without obtaining the formal permission of the signing participants. It's common for condensed ads in this location to take you back to the news outlet's website for more information. If you can't find a particular article, you may be able to search online for people who are talking about it, which may lead you to a copy of the journal article or study.
A database was created with 75 original medical articles recently covered by widely circulated newspapers and a corresponding set of 75 original medical articles recently published in high-impact journals over the same period of time. The study characteristics of 75 articles from clinically oriented journals that received coverage in the five major newspapers by circulation were compared with 75 articles from clinically oriented journals that appeared in the top five medical journals by impact factor over a similar period of time. In addition, because only newspaper articles referring to clinical-oriented healthcare research and using an experimental design hierarchy intended for this purpose were examined, our results cannot be generalized to all scientific coverage. While it is not surprising that the media tend to select articles outside of the journals with the highest impact, they preferentially choose articles lower in the hierarchy of research design, thus favoring studies with lower scientific credibility.
