Managing some Uncertainties of Communication as Academic Discipline in the Spanish and Italian Virtual Environment

Abstract

The premise from which we begin our study is that nowadays we are faced with several uncertainties of communication as academic discipline, amongst which the most evident are: the uncertainty related to the denomination or title of the discipline, the uncertainty concerning its status as theory of communication or as science of communication and the uncertainty regarding the inclusion of communication within one or other of the following domains: social sciences, natural sciences or humanities. Applying the comparative citation analysis on a corpus of study constituted by thirty-two titles of publications representative for the domain of science of information and communication (published in the last twenty years) in two different cultural and scientific areas (Italian and Spanish), we will examine the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citation of these publications in six electronic bookshops. We will also carry out a comparative statistical analysis of the categories and scientific domains these publications are included and comprised in on the virtual platforms so as to reveal the above mentioned uncertainties and to find a solution by proposing a model for the standardization of domain categories and tags of the same title on several bookshop sites.