  Press releases about scholarly news are brief statements provided in advance
to the press, including a description of the most relevant findings of one or
more accepted scientific publications, usually under the condition that
journalists will adhere to an embargo until the publication date. The existence
of centralized platforms such as EurekAlert! allows press releases to be
disseminated online as independent news articles. Press releases can include
additional material (e.g., interviews, commentaries, explanatory tables,
figures, media, recommended readings), which turn them into online objects with
analytical value of their own. The objective of this work is to illustrate how
press releases can be quantitatively analyzed applying similar tools and
approaches as those applied in scientometric research (SCI). To achieve this
goal, a scientometric inspired analytical framework is proposed based on the
formulation of spaces of interaction of objects, actors, and impacts. As such,
the framework proposed considers press releases as science communication (SCO)
objects, produced by different SCO actors (e.g., journalists), and the subject
of receiving impact (e.g., tweets, links). To carry out this analysis, all
press releases published by EurekAlert! from 1996 until 2021 (455,703 press
releases), all tweets including at least one URL referring to a EurekAlert!
press release (1,364,563 tweets), and all webpages with at least one URL
referring to a EurekAlert! press release (54,089,233 webpages) have been
studied. We argue that the large volume of press releases published and their
online dissemination make these objects relevant in the measurement of SCO-SCI
interactions.

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