Global Citation Patterns of Open Access Communication Studies Journals: Pushing Beyond the Social Science Citation Index

Abstract

Connectivity and citations, as used by a large number of scholars in different fields, are a common measure of the health of a discipline. This paper shows the citation patterns for a multinational sample of open access journals in Communication Studies. Their citations are similar to those of the main communication journals, but with more international citations. Principal component analysis and visual network analysis are used to reveal geolinguistic clusters. Direct numerical comparison to the 2007 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is also used. Differences in the citation patterns are attributable to the international nature of the sampled journals, not to their open access status, with only a very small amount of error, most likely coming from the JCR.