Less Fragmented Than We Thought? Toward Clarification of a Subdisciplinary Linkage in Communication Science, 2010–2019

Abstract

With the explosive growth in research topics, communication science is said to be more fragmented and hyper-specialized than ever before, producing an increasing number of small, niche research topics that lack intellectual coherence as a whole. While such issues have been a central concern for the field, there has been a relative lack of systematic effort to map the topical interconnections among different communication science subfields, answering the question of how they remain empirically fragmented. Using full-texts of scholarly articles published in the top 20 communication science journals from 2010 to 2019, we provide systematic evidence to such claims in terms of their actual contents and their connectivity patterns. Drawing on extant works concerning the sociology of science and structures of scientific knowledge, as well as on topic modeling and simulation-based inferences on network topological features, we find that subdisciplinary linkage in communication is more frequent than we often think.

Trusting on the Shoulders of Open Giants? Open Science Increases Trust in Science for the Public and Academics

“…Table 2 contains We performed several exploratory analyses and robustness checks against our methodological and analytic decisions by estimating ITE and additional linear models with covariates (these results are fully reported in the online appendix, Table S8 to S9 Chan & Grill, 2020, Rains et al, 2018, and Song et al, 2020 and whose contact details were listed in ISI Web of Science article record.…”

“…First, communication is often characterized as a "multidisciplinary field," where the structure and scholarly discourses in the field are vastly heterogeneous (Song et al, 2020;Waisbord, 2019). Second, the introduction and adoption of open science practices are still relatively new within the communication field (see Dienlin et al, 2021;Markowitz et al, 2021) compared to other neighboring disciplines such as psychological science, where the open science movement was widely popularized and expected for publication (see Nosek et al, 2015;Simmons, 2011).…”

The State and Evolution of Communication Research: A Topic Modeling Analysis of 20,000 Journal Article Abstracts from 1918-2015

“…The dramatic growth in communication scholars and scholarship during the past century has raised important questions about what it means to study human communication (Eadie, 2011;Swanson, 1993;Wartella, 1996). Although narrative histories (e.g., Delia, 1987;Dennis & Wartella, 1996;Sherry, 2004) and empirical examinations (e.g., Günther & Domahidi, 2017;Song, Eberl, & Eisele, 2020) have attempted to answer them, the current study offers a comprehensive look at the field that is data-driven and more expansive than previous works. We present a descriptive account of the topics that animate communication research by examining the abstracts from more than 20,000 articles published in 22 communication journals between 1918 and 2015.…”

The Meaning Extraction Method: An Approach to Evaluate Content Patterns From Large-Scale Language Data

“…This paper provides a tutorial and guide for the Meaning Extraction Method (Chung and Pennebaker, 2008), which is popular in social psychology but rarely applied to communication research. In fact, a search of papers from all International Communication Association journals, National Communication Association journals, and top communication journals indexed by the ISI Web of Science Journal Citation Report (Song et al, 2020) revealed only four articles that mentioned or used the method (LeFebvre et al, 2015;Kim et al, 2016;Stanton et al, 2017;Tong et al, 2020). 3 Half of these papers were written by an author who helped to popularize the method in psychology as well.…”