Digital Turn Without Digital Methods? Mapping the Journey of Journalism Studies [Dataset]

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing diversity in journalism studies, primarily ascribed to digital transformation in the contemporary context. Analyzing 6,770 publications from the five major journalism journals—Journalism, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies, and Digital Journalism—between 1995 and 2022, we find new evidence that the digital turn is highly visible in journalism studies. Using document co-citation analysis, we first have identified distinct and coherent, yet loosely integrated, research clusters that focus on different journalistic topics, i.e., specialties. Second, we find that digital journalism has not only been integrated into the research agendas within the field but has also formed stand-alone and distinct research clusters. We further show that field structure has developed over the years in response to digital transformation. Yet, digital and computational methods remain in the stark minority compared with the more traditional methods. Our results suggest that journalism studies could benefit from novel inter-cluster communications and methodological innovations.