Indexing of Open Access Journals in Communication

The latest issue of Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian (Jan-March 2014) features research targeted directly at our field,  Open Access Journals in Communication Studies: Indexing in Five Commercial Databases by Sonia Poulin and Robert Tomaszewski. The five databases the authors look at are: Communication Abstracts, Communication and Mass Media Complete (CMMC), Web of Science, Scopus, and EBSCO's Academic Search Complete.

ABSTRACT
This study investigates the degree of indexing of gold open access (OA) journals within the field of communication studies in five major commercial bibliographical databases commonly subscribed to by academic libraries and used by researchers and students. Results of the study indicate that 32 percent of the 147 gold OA journals identified were indexed in the five target databases. The communication studies databases provided the most complete indexing, while among the multidisciplinary databases, Scopus provided more coverage, compared to Academic Search Complete and Web of Science.

Article Feature: Content Analysis of Africa-affiliated Authors in Comm Journals

Work by African-affiliated authors continues to be underrepresented in Communication journals, so find the authors Ann Neville Miller, Christine Deeter, Anne Trelstad, Matthew Hawk, Grece Ingram   and Annie Ramirez in Still the Dark Continent: A Content Analysis of Research About Africa and by African Scholars in 18 Major Communication-Related Journals in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication  (Volume 6, Number 4, November 2013).

ABSTRACT
Research about African communication and studies by African-affiliated authors remain scarce in the field of communication. To establish a comprehensive picture of the state of scholarship, 5,228 articles published in 18 top communication journals between 2004 and 2010 were reviewed. Articles were coded for topic nation, author affiliation, article type, category of communication studied, and research method. Thirty-nine Africa-focused articles including 25 authored by researchers from African institutions were found. Over half addressed health communication; most focused on Kenya and South Africa. Means are suggested by which the international scholarly community can partner to encourage African scholarship.

Evolution of Media Effects Theory

University of Michigan researchers, W. Russell Neuman and Lauren Guggenheim trace the development of media effects theories from 1956-2005 through citation analysis of over 20 thousand articles from five top communication journals. Their findings are published in the latest Communication Theory (Volulme 21, Number 2, May 2011). This issue can be found in the e-journals section of the Penn Libraries website.

The Evolution of Media Effects Theory: A Six-Stage Model of Cumulative Research W. Russell Neuman and Lauren Guggenheim

ABSTRACT

The literature of media effects is frequently characterized as a three-stage progression initially embracing a theory of strong effects followed by a repudiation of earlier work and new model of minimal effects followed by yet another repudiation and a rediscovery of strong effects. We argue that although this dramatic and somewhat romantic simplification may be pedagogically useful in introductory courses, it may prove a significant impediment to further theoretical refinement and progress in advanced scholarship. We analyze the citation patterns of 20,736 scholarly articles in five communication journals with special attention to the 200 most frequently cited papers in an effort to provide an alternative six-stage model of, we argue, cumulative media effects theories for the period 1956–2005.