Abstract

Book digitization is having a significant impact at all economic, business and legal levels. Concepts that had prevailed since the advent of the printing press more than 500 years ago have to be changed. With self-publishing, authors do not need publishers, and some indie (independent) are getting an enthusiastic public reception, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. For their part, publishers, who traditionally had been confined to one language and one territory, can easily reach a global scale with the advent of the e-book. Large multinational companies like Amazon and Apple have already landed in Europe, and soon they will arrive in the rest of the world. The e-book is not only a change from paper to digital but is also having a substantial impact on reading habits.

Abstract

The growing importance of scientific publications of quality, their impact on society in general and on authors’ processes of scientific recognition, as well as journals needing to have international visibility, may increase the number of conflicts of interests among editors, authors and reviewers of scientific publications. The aim of this article is to review recommendations of existing ethics codes. Major international initiatives, their sponsoring entities and specific recommendations made to the different agents of the process are analyzed. The review reveals that the degree of awareness about the ethics of the publications in each discipline and each country depends on tradition, associations, the established reputation and the degree of internationalization of the journals that make up each scientific field.

Abstract

The presence of ethical guidelines in the instructions for authors and reviewers from 214 journals indexed in the Education and Educational Research category of the 2014 edition of the Journal Citation Reports is analyzed. Content and thematic analysis methodology has been followed to examine the presence of topics regarding ethics of scholarly publishing and research. According to the results, 11.2% of the analyzed journals do not include mentions of any ethical topic and the presence of the various subjects studied differs among the rest. The most frequent are criteria for determining plagiarism (63.01%) and duplicate publication (67.12%). Ethical responsibilities of reviewers (7.76%) and sanctions for misconduct (3.20%) have a low presence.

Abstract

The open access (OA) movement has exploded in the last few years. In 2016 we invited 1,896 researchers based in Spanish institutions to fill in a survey on their opinion, attitudes and practices towards OA. We analysed the 554 responses received from researchers in all fields of knowledge (29% response ratio). Most researchers are aware of OA outlets in their fields (86%) and believe OA is beneficial (76%). There isn’t a clear position on the quality of OA journals among Spain-based researchers and there are differences between disciplines. Almost 70% of researchers have published at least one OA article in the last 5 years. Half of them had to pay article processing charges (APCs) that were covered with research funds.

Abstract

This paper studies the social structure of Spanish and Latin American communication researchers through the representation and analysis of three coauthorship networks at the national, institutional, and individual level. Such networks are built from papers indexed in the ‘Communication’ category by Web of Science and published between 2000 and 2019 by authors attached to a Spanish or Latin American institution (n = 5,040). The goal is to characterize the structural features of each network, identify the most central actors, and illustrate the most relevant relationships among nodes. The results show that the most central country is Spain, followed by the USA and other European nations. Among the Latin American states, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico are placed at the most relevant nodes. Latin American collaboration is preferentially addressed to the USA, especially since 2015. Regarding institutions, Spanish public universities in Madrid and Catalonia achieve the highest degrees of centrality. However, the most central Latin American institutions are private universities. The most relevant authors are Spanish researchers until 2015, when they are replaced at the top by Latin American scholars. Collaboration at both the individual and institutional levels shows a deep regional tendency, while the internationalization of researchers and universities is only more visible since 2015. This work identifies a tendency towards internal cohesion at different network levels as the number of connected nodes grows in each period. We conclude that a proper Spanish-Latin America community of communication researchers does not exist.

Abstract

This work presents a current map of scientific research on Communication in Spain, identifying both the research fronts of the publications with the greatest impact over the last three years (2019–2021) and the authors who led such work and their universities of reference. The original methodology applied herein focuses on an analysis of the cited authors. After a careful selection process, we work with a corpus of more than 800 articles, using Scopus and the VOSviewer software to generate a co-referencing map and throw light on the structure of the Communication field. On the basis of that analysis, we identify nine thematic clusters, with a particular grouping structure, leading authors, and relationships around fields of study such as communication, democracy and power, audiences and media consumption, the media industry, journalistic practice, fact checking and disinformation, journalistic innovation, and SEO journalism. The ranking of cited authors, where Ramón Salaverría and Rasmus K. Nielsen hold equal first position and the Chilean Claudia Mellado is the only woman at the head of a strong group, is put into context by analyzing their scientific production and the normalized impact in Communication of their institutions. The comparative analysis reveals the elite Spanish authors in Communication (Xosé López-García, Ignacio Aguaded, Andreu Casero-Ripollés, Lluís Codina, and Ramón Salaverría) and shows how universities in Madrid maintain their importance in terms of production but that those in Catalunya have the lead in terms of impact. The research is completed with a map of keyword co-occurrence that confirms the barrage of studies around the Covid crisis and the parallel and growing number of hoaxes (fakes). The research confirms the relevance of and opportunity to apply scientometric techniques to the Communication field.