Chris Liebold
Emese Domahidi from the CCS group has published a new open-access article together with Felipe Barreto-Storandt titled "One field, two realities: a computational study of topic divergence and academic capital in Latin American and international research" in the journal Annals of the International Communication Association.
Here's what it's all about:
Communication research likes to think of itself as a global discipline — but who gets heard, and what counts as important, is still shaped by a sharp divide between an influential "Core" of mostly Western scholarship and a "Periphery" whose voices often go unnoticed. Using computational topic modeling on more than a hundred thousand articles from Latin American and international communication journals published over the past two decades, this study maps how differently these two worlds talk about communication. While Core journals are dominated by themes around digital media and technology, Latin American research is much more strongly engaged with questions of society and identity, reflecting a long tradition of socially and politically engaged scholarship. Latin American agendas also shift more dynamically in response to current events, whereas Core agendas tend to stay relatively stable. But this regional relevance comes at a price: research from Latin America consistently receives less academic recognition, suggesting that the field's standards of excellence systematically undervalue work rooted in regional concerns. Collaboration across regions helps to bridge the gap, but only partially. The study points to a deeper paradox — staying close to local realities can mean disappearing from the global conversation — and argues that closing this divide will require not just institutional change, but a rethinking of the citation cultures that decide whose work matters.
More details about the paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/anncom/wlag013