  We study how publicity, in the form of highlighting in the science press,
affects the citations of research papers. After a brief review of prior work,
we analyze papers published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) that are
highlighted across eight different platforms. Using multiple linear regression
we identify how each platform contributes to citations. We also analyze how
frequently the highlighted papers end up in the top 1% cited papers in their
field. We find that the strongest predictors of medium-term citation impact --
up to 7 years post-publication -- are Viewpoints in Physics, followed by
Research Highlights in Nature, Editors' Suggestions in PRL, and Research
Highlights in Nature Physics. Our key conclusions are that (a) highlighting for
importance identifies a citation advantage, which (b) is stratified according
to the degree of vetting during peer review (internal and external to the
journal). This implies that we can view highlighting platforms as predictors of
citation accrual, with varying degrees of strength that mirror each platform's
vetting level.
