Less fragmented than we thought? Toward clarification of a subdisciplinary linkage in communication science, 2010-2019

Author(s)
Hyunjin Song, Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Olga Eisele
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.

Organisation(s)
Department of Communication
Journal
Journal of Communication
Volume
70
Pages
310–334
No. of pages
25
ISSN
0021-9916
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaa009
Publication date
2020
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
508007 Communication science
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Communication, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/less-fragmented-than-we-thought-toward-clarification-of-a-subdisciplinary-linkage-in-communication-science-20102019(4a1166ef-d335-4d17-9352-ff23be640260).html