The project investigates whether communication is a self-sustained or externally-dependent discipline. By measuring and analyzing citations of articles not only among communication scholars but also between communication scholars and their counterparts from other disciplines to evaluate the performance of communication research. Our findings suggest that communication research has maintained balanced citation patterns, with a 20% self-citation rate, a 1:1 ratio between incoming and outgoing citations, and a high diversity of in- and out-citations across social science disciplines.
Citation analysis of all research articles published in journals indexed by SSCI-Communication in 2010 and 2020.