Universities as celebrities? How the media select information from a large research assessment exercise

The article enters the international debate on university rankings, observing the visibility premium that institutions gain from their publication. Despite the deep academic skepticism towards the composite indicators used at this aim, rankings are an adaptive solution for individuals to treat information uncertain in nature. Rankings summarize many university quality dimensions into one single number and they fit well the need of media to package information. We have used data from the press review of the Italian VQR 2004–10 to analyze the factors that lead universities to be more frequently cited, under the hypothesis that the visibility of a university is a function of its intrinsic characteristics, such as number of students, prestige, age, or size or density of population in its location. Through a set of regression models, we find that the only variable that matters is the presence in the top positions.