A structural topic modeling of communication research: insights from over a century of journals' abstracts

Abstract

Communication research is a broad and interdisciplinary field that is strongly influenced by several other disciplines, including behavioral and human sciences. This study uses structural topic modeling (STM) to analyze and trace the intellectual structure of the field over the past century based on a twenty-nine communication journals’ corpus encompassing 24,983 abstracts, totaling more than two million words. Results show a wide range of important research themes in the field, including communication theory, media analysis, health communication, rhetorical theory, interpersonal interactions, small group communications, political debate, and speech education. Diachronically, our results reveal that some topics, such as “speech education” and “political debate” have waned over time, whereas other topics, such as “narrative/discourse analysis” and “global policy change” have gained recently more attention from communication scholars. These findings underscore not only the intellectual breadth and historical evolution of communication research but also highlight key paradigm shifts in the field. The study demonstrates how computational text analysis can inform meta-theoretical understanding and strategic planning within academic disciplines.