  The impact made by a scientific paper on the work of other academics has many
established metrics, including metrics based on citation counts and social
media commenting. However, determination of the impact of a scientific paper on
the wider society is less well established. For example, is it important for
scientific work to be newsworthy? Here we present a new corpus of newspaper
articles linked to the scientific papers that they describe. We find that
Impact Case studies submitted to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF)
2014 that refer to scientific papers mentioned in newspaper articles were
awarded a higher score in the REF assessment. The papers associated with these
case studies also feature prominently in the newspaper articles. We hypothesise
that such prominence can be a useful proxy for societal impact. We therefore
provide a novel baseline approach for measuring the prominence of scientific
papers mentioned within news articles. Our measurement of prominence is based
on semantic similarity through a graph-based ranking algorithm. We find that
scientific papers with an associated REF case study are more likely to have a
stronger prominence score. This supports our hypothesis that linguistic
prominence in news can be used to suggest the wider non-academic impact of
scientific work.
