Key Trends in Internet Research Publications

Hong Kong.
The next speaker in this opening session of The Internet Turning 40 is Clement So, who mapped the development of Internet research (especially in the communication field) over the past 20 years using the ISI Web of Science article database. Such studies have been done for communication in general, but not with a specific focus on Internet research. The relevant journal databases in ISI Web of Science cover some 10,000 journals (though they are biased towards English-language journals and the social sciences rather than humanities).

At first, some 94,000 articles were identified by searching for 'Internet' as a key term; that number is still growing quickly, of course. Of these, some 1,600 were published in communication journals. Key areas for the overall group of articles were computer science, engineering, and telecommunications, medicine, and science; social science as a discipline ranked 6th, with communication contribution part of the overall social science group. Real growth started around 1989, with fast growth throughout the 1990s and a more steady increase during the 2000s.

The leading institutions for the overall group (beyond communication) were almost all US-based universities, with a substantial gap between the US and the rest of the world. Interestingly, too, there were more conference papers than journal articles, because of the fast-moving nature of the field. Asian surnames dominated the list of top 100 authors.

In communication alone, there is a similar story - fast growth during the 1990s, with another big jump in 2000; US universities continue to dominate the field, by a large margin, but there is a smaller number of Asia names in the list of leading researches. Journals such as Cyberpsychology and Behaviour, New Media & Society, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication lead the field. In the most cited articles, a range of themes dominate (Internet addition, use, shopping, advertising, etc.); key words most frequently used in correlation with the term 'Internet' include college student, gender difference, personal relationship, network analysis, advertising consumer effect, user behaviour, sexual exposure, adolescent addition, online newspaper, etc.

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