WASHINGTON — Each July, many of the top economists in the world gather in Cambridge, Mass., at a conference hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research. While the work they present comes in all shapes and sizes, from the highly technical to the trendy and provocative, the coveted first day of a key weeklong session is given over to research that will make a media splash.

“I choose the papers,” said David Card, a prominent labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “I choose papers that are going to be written up” in the mainstream press.

Professor Card explained that the elders of the field recognized the growing importance of media visibility, and he felt obliged to give it to them. “It’s what the people want,” he said.

In the days since revelations first appeared that a Ph.D. candidate at U.C.L.A. may have misrepresented data in a study about gay-marriage advocacy — which received coverage in outlets like The New York Times, Vox.com and “This American Life” — many social scientists have observed that their disciplines, which once regarded the ability to attract attention with suspicion, increasingly reward it. It has not gone unnoticed that Michael LaCour, the study’s author, was en route to an assistant professorship at Princeton. (On Friday, a day after the journal Science retracted the study, which it published in December, Mr. LaCour admitted lying about some aspects, but said he stood by the study’s results.)