A Bibliometric Network of Journalism Research

Next up in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yangliu Fan, who presents a bibliometric study of journalism studies publications. This study focussed on the published literature in the field since 1995, examining these publications by understanding their citation patterns. It drew on the full set of publications from the five major journalism journals between 1995 and 2022 – some 6,770 articles – from the OpenAlex database, and examined their co-citation networks: these occur when two earlier articles are cited together in one or more later articles.

The resultant network contained some 5,700 articles connected by 305,000 links, and identified major clusters of co-citation. The network was also divided into five time slices to better examine its evolution over time. Further, texts were analysed through a dictionary-based approach to identify their methods.

Key clusters emerging from this study include content and media effects; participatory journalism and audiences; Twitter and other social media platforms; digital journalism practices; and others. Some of these are more closely connected to each other than others, and those relationships changed over time as the focus of the literature shifted.

Digital and computational methods entered the field strongly around 2010, but remain less widely used by researchers than traditional methods, and unevenly distributed across the topic clusters.