Journalism research: A dominant field of communication research in Spain. A meta-research on Spanish peer-reviewed journals (2000-2014)

Abstract

Since the beginning of Democracy to the present day, “Journalism” has led Spanish communication research. This dominant presence has been especially important for the progressive internationalisation of Spanish research, which began during the early 2000s through the implementation of methodological standards in empirical studies. This paper aims to describe how researchers have developed journalism research published by four source peer-reviewed journals for Spanish communication studies during the period 2000-2014. A specific content analysis protocol has been designed and applied to a sample of 729 journal articles, of which N=360 were focused on journalism, to observe the objects of study in this field, the modalities of research and the research techniques applied. The results show that even though empirical research in journalism studies is in a consolidation stage, mainly focused on content studies of the daily press, it is still far from a diversity of objects of study and from a methodological pluralism.