Cover stories: an emerging aesthetic of prestige science

Our statistical analysis of research publications in the prestigious scientific journals Nature, Science and Cell reveals that papers represented by an image on the journal’s cover gain many more citations in the academic literature than those papers in the same journals that are not represented on the cover. Meanwhile, the number of images used by high-prestige journals is much higher than that used by journals in general, which indicates both the emergence of a new aesthetic of prestige scientific publication, and also that this aesthetic is relevant to journals’ impact. Furthermore, there are significant differences in the use of images in different countries and in different disciplines.