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Nine of NSF's ten nearest neighbors are science and higher-education media — and then there is Urban Outfitters at 0.89, an apparel retailer sitting inside a cluster otherwise defined by academic publishing.
The shape here is broad: similarity scores run from 0.94 down to 0.89 with no single dominant neighbor and no sharp drop-off. The Chronicle of Higher Education leads at 0.94, followed closely by Science Magazine (0.93) and Nature (0.93). Three news publishers — Inside Higher Ed (0.93), Nature News & Comment (0.92), and Times Higher Education (0.89) — extend the same academic-media cluster. Together, magazines and news publishers account for six of the ten positions. NPR Science Desk (0.92) and Nature Communications (0.91) round out the science-media contingent in podcasts/radio and web formats respectively. NIH is the only other Research Organization in the top 10, arriving at 0.89 — meaning NSF's own subcategory is nearly absent from its nearest audience neighborhood, which is instead shaped almost entirely by the media that covers science and higher education. Urban Outfitters, at 0.89, matches that same audience composition despite having no thematic connection to the rest of the set — a reminder that audience shape and subject matter are independent.
The overall picture is an audience defined by engagement with academic and scientific media across formats, broad enough that no single outlet dominates the signal.
