Ten years of research in the highest ranked communication journals. Trends and subjects in JCR and SJR’s highest impact publications

Abstract

Communication, understood as a field of study, is an area with a relatively short history, especially if compared with disciplines like Medicine or Physics. This research article is the result of a Systematic Literature Review of the thirteen-top ranked peer-reviewed journals in the area of communication:  Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR). After reviewing 5,291 articles, publishing patterns and thematic tendencies were identified. Thus, this article evidences that some journals privilege some topics over others as well as the rise of the academic research in communication due to the ease of publishing, thanks to online publishing platforms adopted by peer-reviewed journals. Likewise, the presence of many topics across the period of analysis was identified in order to set a general idea about their temporal development through the last ten years. This contributes to the literature corpus related to publication and citation patterns among journals and scholars by highlighting the main trends in communication research in the last decade.