Differentiating the Regional Communication Journals: A Computer Assisted Concept Analysis

Author: Timothy Stephen (Department of Communication, University at Albany & President of CIOS)

Description: The journals of the four U.S. regional communication associations, all maintaining equivalent editorial policies, have published jointly more than 2,900 articles since 1970. Computer assisted automated content analysis was employed to study the conceptual structure of the discipline as represented by this literature. Using data from the ComIndex database, the words in article titles were linguistically normalized and filtered to isolate significant concept terms. Cluster analysis was then applied to the transformed data. This procedure identified 12 clusters of concepts, representing areas of significant scholarly interest across the four journals. ANOVA procedures revealed differences between the four journals on 5 of the 12 clusters. Results are considered in light of differences between the journals and the implications of the findings for the role of omnifocus journals in an era of increasing fragmentation in scholarly publishing.

Reference: Stephen, T. (2001). Differentiating the U.S. regional communication journals: A computer assisted concept analysis. presented at the meeting of the International Communication Association. Washington D. C., May.