Korean communication studies has witnessed its more than fifty years' history. As an ever-growing science, it has rapidly expanded its research area with the advent of an information society in the middle and late part of the 1980s. The purpose of thi...
Korean communication studies has witnessed its more than fifty years' history. As an ever-growing science, it has rapidly expanded its research area with the advent of an information society in the middle and late part of the 1980s. The purpose of this study was to reveal the intellectual structure of domestic communication research fields after the advent of information society by author co-citation analysis(ACA), in order to highlight major subject specialization, identify authors and their relations within these specialities.
ACA is one way of finding relationships between research areas. It was conducted for the years 1989 to 2006, using the six representative communication's journals registered in the Korea Research Foundation. 69 authors were selected according to citation frequency. The investigator examined the frequency of co-citation and then worked out a square matrix. By making the frequency of co-citation a similarity scale, data were converted into a Pearson correlation coefficient. Based on the coefficient, the investigator carried out cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling to work out a map that indicated a relative position among authors. Co-citation data were calculated for every author pair, and multivariate analyses were performed to show the relationships among authors.
A multidimensional author's map was created and all authors were represented by dots reflected the proximity of authors. And this position of authors on the map reflects a sub-discipline. In addition, by classifying the data period into three, the investigator worked out a map of detailed position of authors to examine concretely the topography of ever-changing communication studies according to the advancement of an information society. By comparatively examining data on the basis of the classified time periods, the investigator analyzed the changes of detailed research fields and its rise and fall.
One of the features of domestic communication studies in accordance with the advent of information society is the expansion of research fields centering on new media. With this feature, the problem of fragmentation has been generated with which the interchange of information between sub-disciplines. This problem is regarded as a factor of threatening the identity of communication. In this study, the investigator examined the media-centered expansion of domestic communication studies and looked into its fragmentation signs. For this, the investigator attempted a network analysis by using the UCINet, and compared intellectual interchanges among authors by means of a questionnaire survey.
Study findings are as follows:
First, through a position map of intellectual relationship of 69 authors, six sub-disciplinary areas in domestic communication research fields were found for the study period. These sub-disciplinary areas were: (1) mobile phone-oriented mobile communication, (2) new media-centered broadcast user research, (3) new media-centered broadcast policy and industrial theory, (4) broadcast-centered critical and cultural research, (5) journalism-centered political and critical communication and (6) newspaper history and public relation. These areas can be classified into two in large: (1) a journalism that utilizes qualitative methodology; and (2) new media that includes broadcast media and centers on quantitative researches.
Second, by working out a position map of authors by dividing the study period into three (six years each), the changes of communication research according to the advent of information society were able to be traced. In the first period (1989~1994), the influence of information society was meager. However, new media-related areas have appeared in full-scale since the second period (1995~2000). And the mobile communication has been shaped as an independent research area since the third period. Comparing to the first period, such a traditional sphere as general communication-journalism was either diminished or sluggish in the third period, while new media-related area come to the fore. In addition, the interdisciplinary characteristic of communication was partly identified in the third period. The number of specialized researchers on other social sciences was six in the first period, but it was three in the second period and only one in the third period. As in USA, domestic communication has been influenced by other sciences such as politics and sociology, but the extant of influence has been gradually diminished as the time went by.
Third, there was no such an author group that played the role of bridge that interconnected sub-disciplinary areas, but UCINet analysis showed that there were authors whose centrality was strong. As to the extant of degree centrality, closeness centrality, and between centrality, both the journalism-centered political/critical communication and the broadcast-centered critical and cultural research were relatively higher than other areas.
Fourth, through a questionnaire survey of authors, the shaping of social-collaborative ties was identified. Authors who were in a similar relations appeared to have over a 50% of interchanges in citation, regular correspondence, and scientific advice, but those who were in a dissimilar relations appeared to have only about 7% of interchanges in those spheres. In particular, the frequency of giving and taking citation was a 65.1% for similar authors, whereas it was only an 8.1% for dissimilar authors, thus partly revealing the sign of the low repetition of citations as a proof of fragmentation. On the other hand, a questionnaire survey of authors with which they personally selected authors of a close/distant intellectual relations showed that their responses were similar to the results of similarity measurement according to the frequency of co-citation. With this finding, the validity of the results of author co-citation analysis was established and the preceding studies of which findings proved that there were interchanges among authors were supported.
Finally, as other empirical studies, study findings have many limits to be generalized, but they can be a metrical datum that provides a starting point of discussion in settling the problems generated in the developing process of domestic communication in the future. If more studies on the intellectual structure of communication research were performed in the future with sufficient citation data and improved methods, study findings can be useful data for the balanced development of science and the establishment of media policies.