Abstract

The treatment of scientific information is analysed in the digital edition of the most-read newspapers in Spain: El país, El mundo, ABC and 20 minutos in December 2012, 2013 and 2014. The subject of inquiry is the published news, of which the quantity has been determined, the sources identified, and each issue categorized by the area of science to which it refers. The data obtained leads to the conclusion that the online editions, rather than overcoming the disadvantages of homogenisation and selectivity, have accentuated them. Biology and biomedicine, along with astrophysics, are the most high-profile areas. Furthermore, they rely fundamentally on two types of source: high-impact journals and research centres, most of them international.

Abstract

This paper approaches the state of academic production in communication confined to the Hispanic sphere, namely, Spain and Latin America, during the period extending between 2013 and 2017. As in previous meta-research, the aim here is to highlight potential shortcomings in the discipline, both theoretically and methodologically. From an instrumental standpoint, a systematic, objective and quantitative content analysis was implemented on a probabilistic sample of 1,548 articles from the seven main journals in the field, all indexed in the first quartiles of the SJR-Scopus ranking. Aside from the percentage report for each variable, two-stage cluster analyses were performed twice to identify statistically significant publication patterns. As far as the results are concerned, it is worth highlighting the empirical nature of the studies, generally relying on quantitative methodologies, although no specific theoretical corpora are referenced. On the other hand, and although social networks and ICTs have gained a notable prominence, traditional media continue to be, collectively, the most prominent in communication research. Finally, the challenges of the field seem to revolve around two axes: providing studies with methodological robustness and, above all, with the theoretical background necessary to confront, with guarantees, the understanding of the liquid communicative manifestations that flow, at great speed, from the Information Society.