Communication Research. Bibliometric analysis of the most-cited ISI-indexed Journals

This article examines some of the most common methodological problems in the evaluation of academic journals in the field of communication, based on the content analysis of the ten journals with the highest impact factors in the Social Sciences Citation Index. The analysis focuses on establishing the academic and research origins and links of the authors of the articles published by these scientific publications, as well as the most predominant subject matters, genres and methodologies among the articles of these publications. This research aims to achieve two objectives: On the one hand, to analyse the role of the evaluation of communication journals in the assessment of research, which will allow us to show the difficulties of applying the bibliometric methods used by Thomson Scientific to determine the impact of journals and, on the other hand, to establish a development framework for those Spanish communication journals that meet some of the requirements of the Social Sciences Citation Index but are not yet indexed in it, either because their impact factor is still low or because of their lack of international dissemination. This research has been financed by the University of Malaga’s Research Institute for Public Relations.