External science communication uses media and other means, such as news reports on scientific publications, to produce awareness and understanding of science and its results. Scientific publications that were featured in the news are linked to higher citations and altmetric-counts when compared to similar unfeatured articles. So far, the question about the relationship between attributes of scientific publications, their mentions in a news report, and their effect on researchers' decision to look up a scientific publication remained unanswered: a research gap this study attempts to fill. First, we conducted a threephased variation of a Delphi survey to generate a selection of attributes that experts deem relevant for evaluating scientific publications. Then the attributes were discussed with a focus group and optimized for a large-scale online conjoint study with 642 respondents. Statistical analysis revealed that attributes which indicate expert opinion and methodological quality are the major drivers behind looking up scientific publications mentioned in news reports. This finding underscores that forms of external science communication and the highlighting of particular publication attributes positively affect the awareness of scientific publications that are also positively related with a publication’s citation counts.