The Scholarly Impacts of Newspapers: The Guardian, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times

Abstract

This report presents findings from an examination of the scholarly uses of four prominent newspapers: The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. This is a follow up project to earlier work quantifying the impacts of investment in humanities archives (Meyer, 2016; Meyer & Eccles, 2016, 2017) that looked at The New York Times in comparison to two digital collections: Early English Books Online and The House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.

That earlier research suggested that The New York Times when considered as a scholarly resource had a much broader influence across disciplines than the other resources we examined, with publications spread right across a standardized overlay map of scholarly publications. Updated versions of those findings are presented in this report, along with comparisons to the other newspapers we examine here.

The four newspapers in question were selected to provide a comparison between American (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) and United Kingdom publications (The Guardian), but also between newspapers with different target audiences. The New York Times and Guardian both appeal to a general educated readership, while the Wall Street Journal is aimed at those interested in business and finance, and the Washington Post appeals particularly to those interested in U.S. politics.

Keywords: newspapers, impact, scholarship