Abstract

This article is a review of the state of the art on digital advertising in major journals in Spain since 2002. The objective is to determine what issues are the most discussed and the theoretical and practical contributions made by the authors. It draws on the work of Louisa Ha (2008), a state-of-the-art on digital advertising studies published in major journals. Our starting point is all journals included in the In-Recs Spanish communication area journals ranking. The studies are categorized according to their scientific analysis into seven categories: attitude towards online advertising, internet as an ad medium; interactivity in online advertising, online ad processing and execution, audience measurement, online/offline advertising synergies and online advertising education.

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.

Abstract

The normative theory of citing considers citations as rewarding tools to acknowledge the influence of scientific works, while the social constructivist theory of citing considers citations, for example, as persuasion tools used by authors to support their claims, and convince the scientific community that those claims are valid. Other citation theories and models have been proposed in recent years to overcome the limitations of the normative and social constructivist theories. Nevertheless, they have not been able to fully explain all citation motives of scientists (but have a certain focus). This study proposes a new theory (which we call “social systems citation theory”, SSCT) that integrates previous theories and models on publications and their citation links and is mainly based on Niklas Luhmann’s “social systems theory”. Luhmann’s social systems theory focuses on “communications” as the basic constituting elements of a social science system and not on humans and their motives. Humans are not part of social systems but are connected with them and irritate them. Thus, the social systems theory does not have the problem of integrating various and different motives of humans to cite in the science system. In the SSCT, authors’ motives to cite belong to psychic systems while publications and their citation links belong to the social science system. The systems operate autonomously but interact with each other: the social system operates recursively with publications and citation links. Although psychic systems stimulate or irritate the science system, they do not determine communications in the science system. In this study, we explain the SSCT and demonstrate how the theory can be used to underlie empirical bibliometric studies.