Scientific collaboration plays a vital role in generating novel ideas and innovative research progress among the researchers. Similarly, news diffusion also has an important role among the research communities. Though the collaboration networks have made an impact in scientific activities and attracted the attention of scientific communities, no work so far analyzed the cause which can determine the future research publications. The objective of this paper is to study influence of news trends on scientific collaboration and research publications. For this purpose, we have collected the top technological news trends and applied the LDA model to identify top research keywords from the articles. The results show that the news trends play a significant role on scientific collaborations and innovative research progress. It is found that the researchers identify their research gap, make future collaborations and does interdisciplinary research. Our results highlight the important role of diffusion of news, which influence the young researchers to generate novel ideas and tend to collaborate more with different scientific communities. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.