Hot papers, cool media?

Sci-Bytes runs an interesting slot on "hot papers" in particular areas of science. The latest SCI-BITES: Hot Paper in Physics is "Universal intrinsic spin Hall effect," by Jairo Sinova and 5 others, Physical Review Letters, 91(12): 126603, published on 26 March 2004.

Now, this is hairy science. But when the rest of the scientific world thinks it is worth referring to, and often, it certainly looks like something that should interest science writers.

A search for "Universal intrinsic spin Hall effect" AND "Jairo Sinova" on Google found 270 hits. None of them, though, at a quick glance, looked like something written by a science writer. Maybe they did not put out a press release.

Searching for "spin Hall effect" AND "Jairo Sinova" turned up 864 hits. One was for a paper a bit later than the one most cited. That did make it into journals like Science. So the word is getting out.

There is an interesting research project here for one of the many students of science in the media. What is the link, if any, between how the scientific community rates a paper and the media coverage it garners? Maybe it is something I can do in my retirement.