After the lists have been extracted from the NewsWhip Insights database, a single sample of articles will be extracted, following a protocol of alternating between the two lists and eliminating duplicates. A study administrator will be responsible for combining the two lists into one, following the procedure below.
The detailed sampling steps are the following:
- Each of the NewsWhip Insights lists are ordered in descending order of popularity (defined as number of Facebook shares or Twitter retweets).
- The first list from which an article is selected is chosen randomly between the two lists (Facebook or Twitter) by coin flip.
- The most popular article in the currently selected social media platform list, defined as the one receiving the largest number of shares in its media platform within a month of publication, among the remaining ones in that platform list is selected into the sample.
- The newly added article is removed from both platforms’ lists of potential review articles.
- Steps 3 to 4 get repeated, alternating the social media platform at each iteration, until the sample list has enough articles to complete the selection and review phases.