The societal impact of scientific research is a key concern for scientists, research managers, and policymakers. As a highly specialized and complex field, physics is likely to exhibit distinct patterns of societal impact. Yet, few studies have quantitatively examined the societal attention received by physics papers. To support this analysis, we analyzed a sample of 15,024 papers published since 2008 from the American Physical Society dataset, using four Altmetric indicators to measure societal attention. Specifically, we examine the factors influencing societal attention toward physics papers and how they interact. The results yield important findings. First, disciplinary differences exist. For example, applied and interdisciplinary physics papers attract more societal attention. Second, the societal attention received by physics papers is positively associated with features such as citations, interdisciplinary scope, and abstract readability. Exploratory factor analysis further integrated these features into three high-level factors: collaboration degree, author seniority, and citation impact. Third , we observed significant interaction effects among these factors. Collaboration degree and author seniority exhibited a negative interaction for most Altmetric indicators, suggesting that collaboration benefits junior authors more than senior ones in gaining societal attention. Furthermore, a negative interaction exists between citation impact and author seniority for Mendeley readership and the Altmetric score, with citation impact being the dominant factor. This indicates that author influence diminishes in high-quality research. However, citation impact and collaboration degree interact differently across the Altmetric indicators, highlighting notable platform differences.
Min et al. (Sat,) studied this question.