A journal set in an interdisciplinary or newly developing area can be determined by including the journals classified under the most relevant ISI Subject Categories into a journal-journal citation matrix. Despite the fuzzy character of borders, factor analysis of the citation patterns enables us to delineate the specific set by discarding the noise. This methodology is illustrated using communication studies as a hybrid development between political science and social psychology. The development can be visualized using animations which support the claim that a specific journal set in communication studies is increasingly developing, notably in the "being cited" patterns. The resulting set of 28 journals in communication studies is smaller and more focused than the 45 journals classified by the ISI Subject Categories as "Communication." The proposed method is tested for its robustness by extending the relevant environments to sets including many more journals.
Teaching and research are organised differently between subject domains: attempts to construct typologies of higher education institutions, however, often do not include quantitative indicators concerning subject mix which would allow systematic comparisons of large numbers of higher education institutions among different countries, as the availability of data for such indicators is limited. In this paper, we present an exploratory approach for the construction of such indicators. The database constructed in the AQUAMETH project, which includes also data disaggregated at the disciplinary level, is explored with the aim of understanding patterns of subject mix. For six European countries, an exploratory and descriptive analysis of staff composition divided in four large domains (medical sciences, engineering and technology, natural sciences and social sciences and humanities) is performed, which leads to a classification distinguishing between specialist and generalist institutions. Among the latter, a further distinction is made based on the presence or absence of a medical department. Preliminary exploration of this classification and its comparison with other indicators show the influence of long term dynamics on the subject mix of individual higher education institutions, but also underline disciplinary differences, for example regarding student to staff ratios, as well as national patterns, for example regarding the number of PhD degrees per 100 undergraduate students. Despite its many limitations, this exploratory approach allows defining a classification of higher education institutions that accounts for a large share of differences between the analysed higher education institutions.
In this article, we analyse the organisation of the doctorate in communication sciences in the context of the overall discussion on the changing organisation of doctoral studies in Switzerland. We focus on three tensions which appear central for the field, namely the employment status of doctoral students, the importance of academic vs. professional training and, finally, the organisation of doctoral studies and the possibilities and difficulties in the introduction of a graduate school model. Our results show that in this field the doctorate has to be considered more as an orientation period, where professional and academic training coexist and where there is an extremely high diversity of objectives, activities and organisation forms, both between universities and individual students. This model is surprisingly well adapted to the situation of a field characterised by high internal diversity, rather low research intensity and strong orientation to application. Reforms like the introduction of graduate schools or the reinforcement of academic training have thus to be implemented with some care.
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