The Winner Takes It All: International Inequality in Communication and Media Studies Today

Abstract

In this research, we analyzed all 79 Web of Science (WoS) indexed journals in communication and media studies to disclose main publication patterns. We found that English-language countries dominate the field in a greater extent than in other disciplines, and developing countries are in a weaker position than English-language developed countries not just in natural sciences but also in soft sciences. We found significant correlations between the nominal GDP, the per capita publication, and per capita GDP of a given country and its publication scores.

Keywords

communication and media studies publication patterns scientometrics science collaboration

Publish or Perish Paradigm Reconsidered

Despite the many changes that occurred during the history of modern science, the publish or perish paradigm remained inviolate (Erren, Shaw, & Morfeld, 2016). On an international level, the most important condition for professional success represented in tenure and hiring decisions is based on publications in leading peer-reviewed journals (Zdenek, 2017). Consequently, high-quality journals have become the possessors of considerable international power, while journal editors and reviewers tend to function as gatekeepers. Moreover, not just authors, but also editors have to meet serious requirements as regards scientific reputation. Being indexed in high-quality international databases such as Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, or Medline is one of the main challenges of publishers and editors of a given journal for making their periodicals visible and highly cited (Astaneh & Masoumi, 2018). It is not a surprise, then, that a very challenging competition takes place in scientific research to increase value and visibility. On one hand, publishers and editors would like to have periodicals with the highest impact factor, while, on the other hand, authors from all around the world would like to be published in those highly visible journals.

I couldn’t help relating how similar our academic research is to the Olympics, especially in sports that require judging such as gymnastics and diving. We are both in a highly competitive business and compete on a global level. We follow the standards set by our peers in the field through a refereed process. (Ha, 2016, p. 725)

But science is usually not just thought of as highly competitive, but also as a highly fair-and-square field of reality. However, it is also stated by many social scientists and philosophers that it does not mean equal possibilities for every contributor. Science is full of invisible colleges (Price, 1965) and nonacademic factors such as economy, politics, geographical position (Shenhav, 1986), or cultural and epistemic differences (Toth, 2012). These differences obviously divide the world of science into two parts: There are successful countries, which have leading periodicals and/or many publications in them, and there are the so-called Matthew countries, which do not have highly visible journals, neither have they many authors that publish in leading periodicals (Zanotto, Haeffner, & Guimaraes, 2016). Moreover, even if Matthew-country authors succeed in publishing their work in leading journals, they will be less cited than their developed country colleagues (Bonitz, Bruckner, & Scharnhorst, 1997). The Matthew effect has been investigated and approbated in many fields: Martin-Martin, Orduna-Malea, Ayllon, and López-Cózar (2015) pointed out the role of differences between professional practices, forms of organizations, main values, and beliefs. Arunachalam (2002) shows the main characteristics of a Matthew country in the context of India, while Gerke and Evers (2006) did the same in Southern Asian societies. According to current research on this topic, the only chance for a developing country author to become internationally recognized is to immigrate or to cooperate with developed country authors (Fernandez, Ferrandiz, & Leon, 2016; Schmoch & Schubert, 2008; Teodorescu & Tudorel, 2011).

World Regions in Science

Dependency theory tries to explain the above-mentioned division of the world into two parts: the set of winner or developed countries and the set of loser or Matthew countries. Dependency theory dates back to Prebisch (1959), who has a Marxist conception on the global economic system. His most important statements were that (a) the center derived (at least partly) its wealth from the periphery, (b) the relationship between subdominant and dominant states is an enduring one, and (c) the only chance for a dependent area to become a center is that it should break away from the old, dominant center (Love, 1980). The dominant states are typically the well-developed, industrial countries, and the dependents are South American, Asian, and African countries with low GDP (Ferraro, 2008). The term Global South refers to a (not always geographically meant) socioeconomic and political divide between the developed North and the developing South. While the category “North” includes Canada, the United States, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the developed countries of Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore), South refers to Southern America, Africa, the developing countries of Asia, and the Middle East.

Although dependency theory is typically used in economics and political science, it might be useful as regards scientific contribution, for besides the classical indicators of modernization such as urbanization, infant mortality, literacy rates, and life expectancy (Bruszt & Greskovits, 2009), international scientific presence could also be conceived as an important indicator of development (Ataie-Ashtiani, 2017b). Moreover, based on dependency theory, we can use the categorization of the world into Global North and Global South. With this, our analysis could show more fundamental patterns in science contribution in communication and media studies (CMS) than it would be possible on the level of countries. Based on former studies on dependency theory, we could suggest that

H1: A correlation between GDP factors and publication amount per capita could be demonstrated.

It is not just that if authors from the South would like to acquire an international grant or tenure in the North, they must prove their research excellence with articles in leading journals, but the authors’ native affiliations might also expect international publications. So while Southern authors try linking to the center by complying with the standards of international publication processes, methodologies and research topics prescribed by Northern publishers and editors (Günther & Domahidi, 2017), they frequently try to find alternative ways. The first and the only adaptive way of raising their visibility is establishing their own but still high-quality journals. The second way is trying to charge leading journals with a large quantity of submitted papers. Although there is a considerable growth of scientific publications on a global level, the most rapid growth could be experienced in developing countries such as China, Iran, Turkey, Cyprus, and Oman (Ataie-Ashtiani, 2017a). But as the same authors point out, among these publications, we could find papers of problematic quality on a large scale. Authors from the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region also reinforce the above-mentioned phenomenon, stating that in developing countries, “research misconduct shows a substantially higher rate than in developed countries” (Pupovac, Prijic-Samarzija, & Petrovecki, 2017, p. 165). Finally, the third and most problematic way for escaping from the uneven competition against Northern authors is publishing in predatory or nonindexed journals and/or participating in publication cartels (Dehal, Krishan, Kanchan, & Singh, 2017; Patnaik, 2016). In our second hypothesis, we suggest that

H2a: Leading (social science indexed [SSCI]) journals will publish mainly authors from the Global North.

H2b: CMS authors of the Global South would tend to find alternative ways for publishing their research.

Publication Inequalities in Communication and Media Studies (CMS)

In the case of CMS, we have many historical facts that could explain the dominance of the United States, at least in the first period of the discipline’s history. The so-called received history of the field (Pooley & Park, 2013) tells us that the discipline begins with the study of propaganda in the United States, and all the four “founders of communication studies,” namely, Kurt Lewin, Carl Hovland, Harold Lasswell, and Lazarsfeld—were American. But as Pooley and Park put it, the historians of the field “have ignored the global South. We call out the patterned neglect as one fault among others that, taken together, undercuts the appearance of health in abundance” (Pooley & Park, 2013, p. 76). When analyzing more than 1,600 articles on the history of CMS, the authors found obvious bias toward the Global North:

the United States and United Kingdom were tagged more than twice as often as the rest of the world combined. The inequality was far more pronounced in the case of developing countries: the United States and United Kingdom were tagged 14 times as often as the entire global South. Put another way, more than half (55 percent, or 906 entries) of all studies focused on the United States, the United Kingdom, or both countries. If Canada and Australia are included, the total rises to 1,107 entries, or more than 60 percent of the total. And the global South? Less than 4 percent—a mere 65 entries—covered historical topics in the developing world. (Pooley & Park, 2013, p. 80)

As regards the academic field, American and Western European precedency is also obvious, because the first university-based communication education (mostly in journalism) had been established in American, German, and French universities in the first years of the 20th century. It was also in the United States where “communication was first institutionalized as an academic field in the decades after World War II” (Simonson, Peck, Craig, & Jackson, 2013, p. 26).

The other equally important historical fact is that, in the case of many regions of the Global South, there was a repressive political regime that made the development of CMS literally impossible for decades. The typical example is the state socialism of all Eastern European and some Asian, South American, and African countries. In other countries, there were, and in some cases, there still is military or religious dictatorship. The serious deficiencies in free speech, the absence of press freedom, the prohibition of international traveling, and the lack of appropriate language learning—except Russian—led to isolation from the international scientific community, especially in the case of the ideologically more sensitive social sciences (Kornai, 1992). The consequence of these features was an “academic gap” between the Western and Eastern conception of communication and media studies (Lauk, 2015). After the end of the bipolar world, despite the efforts of these regions in the past 25 years (academic institutions, university faculties, national and international organizations, and professional journals), there is a wide abyss between the scientific contribution of developing countries and that of the West.

Publication Patterns in CMS

Analyzing publication patterns in CMS dates back as early as 1989, when a special issue of Communication Research on this topic was published (Vol. 16, Issue 5). Similarly, Journal of Communication dedicated three special issues to analyze publication patterns and subfields in CMS (Vol. 43, Issue 3; Vol. 54, Issue 4; and Vol. 55, Issue 3). The most popular analyses on publication patterns dealt with citation networks in CMS journals (Borgman, 1989; Borgman & Reeves, 1983; Bunz, 2005; Feeley, 2008; Funkhouser, 1996; Rice, Borgman, & Reeves, 1988; Rogers, 1999). In terms of publication inequalities, the most important research was published in 2005, in which Edmund Lauf analyzed the international diversity of 40 SSCI journals in CMS. He found that internationality is very low, with an absolute American dominance. Lauf also stated that this American dominance is much greater than in other disciplines. He thought that it is due to ownership and language issues, because all SSCI journals publish in English, which favors English native speakers. This hypothesis was further reinforced by his finding that English-speaking countries were represented in SSCI communication journals with 86%.

Later research reinforced Lauf’s findings on national inequalities. Delgado and Repiso (2013) compared different indexing databases (Communication and Mass Media Complete, Ulrich’s International Directory, Google Scholar Metrics, Scopus, WoS), and they found the most biased publication patterns in the most prestigious databases (in Scopus and in WoS). In these two sources, almost 80% of the indexed journals were published in the United States or the United Kingdom, while the same ratio was only 54% in Google Scholar Metrics.

Much research shows that inequalities between the publication achievement of the Global North and the Global South are much bigger in social sciences and in humanities than in the case of natural sciences, life sciences, or mathematics, and what is more, coauthorships are also less frequent in the case of soft sciences (Gumpenberger, Sorz, Wieland, & Gorraiz, 2016; Moody, 2004). It is not surprising, however, if we consider that language issues, epistemic, cultural, and regional differences matter mostly in social sciences and in humanities, while they are not quite as important in mathematics, physics, or life sciences. As current research shows, the situation is the same in CMS, where not just the main topics, but also the methodology and the relevant sources and authors are assigned by leading journals of the field that belong, almost without exception, to the Global North, and especially to the United States (Demeter, 2017, 2018). Thus, our third hypothesis suggests that

H3a: The publication patterns in CMS will resemble patterns in social sciences in terms of national diversity.

H3b: Collaboration between authors from the Global North and the Global South would be quite infrequent.

Although we found former studies on publication inequalities in CMS very important and informing, we have to point out some of their faults. Most research, and especially Lauf’s, divide the world into Western and non-Western regions, and treat the latter as a homogeneous domain. This categorization of the world overemphasizes the role of the West: while the West or the Global North is differentiated in categorization (United States, United Kingdom, Western Europe, Oceania, and the developed Asia), all other regions (instead of being categorized as Eastern Europe, Africa, the Developing Asia, South America, and the Middle East) are treated as a solid category called “Others.” This categorization is rather problematic, as it is not just that these regions have diverse historical, political, cultural, and academic features, but they are developing in very different ways (Erfanmanesh, Tahira, & Abrizah, 2017). In our current research, in which we analyze the scientific contribution of different countries, world regions, and the Global North and South in the field of CMS, we will also reconstitute these above-mentioned analytical categories to get a more detailed picture on not just the publication patterns of the Global North but of the usually neglected Global South, too.

Method

Before the examination of main patterns of publication in CMS, we made a comparative analysis by which we could confront our target research field with other disciplines. For this reason, we made databases by WoS in SCI/SSCI with the following indicators: top 50 countries/territories & [1975 & 1976 . . . (. . .) . . . 2017] & research fields [(Physics) (Chemistry) (Mathematics) (Philosophy) (Social Science General) (Psychology) (Communication)]. In the case of communication, we refined the analysis to filter mathematical and purely technical issues, because we wanted to concentrate on nontechnical issues of communication studies. This filtering is quite important, because, as we mentioned earlier, epistemic, cultural, educational, and thematic biases are far more frequent in the case of social sciences and the humanities than in the case of more technical disciplines. Much communication research that has been published in communication journals deals with purely technical issues such as signal processing, data mining protocols, or the technological conditions of bandwidth expansions. Authors of these papers are mostly from the natural sciences, and they cannot be regarded as CMS scholars in the classical sense. Because we concentrate here on culturally or even regionally sensitive issues in communication studies, we decided to exclude papers with purely technical foci. We also excluded book reviews and opinion papers because we concentrated on original research.

We also made longitudinal measures for communication and, for the sake of comparison, for mathematics. We chose the latter because, as opposed to communication or other social sciences, mathematics is ideologically neutral, and we could assume that the effects of the end of the Cold War around 1990 operate less on mathematics than on CMS. We will argue further on this issue in the section “Discussion.” In our longitudinal research, by which we could follow publication trends from 1975 (which is the first year of WoS data) to 2017, we differentiated three main periods: from 1975 to the end of the Cold War (1990), from 1991 to 2017, and, for the most current trends, from 2013 to 2017. In ascertaining the current trend time period, we adjusted our analysis to the research of Lauf (2005) who assigned this category in 5 years. In the case of all three periods, we used percentages instead of raw numbers to make the patterns comparable.

After the comparative analysis, we turned to CMS by analyzing leading publications in the field. As a research sample, we selected the SSCI list of 79 leading journals (see Online Appendix 1 for the detailed list and data) and registered their place of publication as they were represented in Scopus SCImago. Then we analyzed their articles with the indicators [country/territory], [world region], and [dependency category]. The indicator [country/territory], given by WoS, refers to the location of the first author’s affiliation. [World region] could be North America, Western Europe, Oceania, South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and we have two dependency categories, namely, the Global North and the Global South. We made the above-mentioned categorization for research articles in all 79 journals from 1975 to 2012, and, for the current trends, from [2013 to 2017]. This means that our full sample consists of 10,654 authors for the first, and 6,504 authors for the second time period.

To contextualize our results, we made comparisons for the top 50 countries in CMS by adding their nominal GDP, population, and per capita GDP to their publication numbers for gaining correlations (combined covariance and Spearman’s rho).

Finally, we built a database of all the 825 articles published in the leading communication journals (represented with Q1-rank in SSCI Communication journals; see Online Appendix 1) in 2016 to make an in-depth analysis of science collaboration networks. As a result, we get a network of 1,806 authors and analyzed their collaboration by Gephi 9.02 network analyzer and visualization software. We ascertained our categories as formerly, so we made calculations and visualizations for categories [country/territory], [world region] and [dependency category = Global North/Global South].

Results

Our measurements as regards SCI/SSCI indexed publication in diverse disciplines from 1975 to 2017 show salient differences between the investigated research fields. Although the leading region was either North America or Western Europe in every case, we could find three different patterns. The first type of publication pattern includes the natural sciences (math, chemistry, and physics) with Western Europe as the leading region, followed by North America. Asian contribution is still high (between 18% and 23%). This is followed by a moderate Eastern European contribution (6%-8%), while Oceania, the Middle East, and South America share only 3%. African contribution is less than 1%. The second pattern (Philosophy and General Social Sciences) is similar except that Western European and North American contribution is almost equal, and Asian concernment (6%-8%) is much lower than it was in the case of natural sciences. Eastern Europe was much more important in Philosophy (7%) than it was in social sciences (2%). Southern American, African, and Middle Eastern contribution is still very low (1%-3%). The third pattern (with Communication and Psychology) shows a sharp Northern American domination (48%) followed by Western European contribution (32%-34%). Oceania shares 5% to 6%, while all the other regions’ concernment is marginal (1%-4%). It is noteworthy that while in the case of the first pattern (natural sciences), Western Europe and North America share 62% to 66% of the publications, this ratio is 75% in the second pattern (General Social Sciences and Philosophy), and the most unbalanced pattern is obviously the third (Psychology and Communication), where these two leading regions have 80% to 82% of all the WoS indexed publications.

Although the difference between the contribution of the Global North and the Global South was enormous in the case of all disciplines, there is an observable difference between natural sciences and the soft sciences (Figure 1). While in natural sciences, the publication rate is approximately 82:18 in favor of the North, the inequality is discernibly higher in soft sciences (10:90 in both Psychology and in the Social Sciences, and also in Philosophy), with the strongest difference in the case of CMS (93:7).

Figure 1.

Contribution of world regions in different disciplines from 1975 to 2017, by the affiliation of authors of research articles indexed in SCI/SSCI WoS.

Our comparative longitudinal analysis shows some clear trends in both mathematics and CMS (see Table 2 in Online Appendix 5 for details). The first period (1975-1990) was obviously a North America-determined period when most articles (67% in mathematics and 78% in CMS) were written by authors from that region. This ratio was only 40% in CMS and 28% in mathematics between 1991 and 2017, while Western European contribution strengthened in a great measure, from 17% to 35% in CMS and from 23% to 34% in Mathematics while American dominance has been weakened from 78% to 34% in CMS and from 68% to 33% in Mathematics. The role of Asia became important in Mathematics (from 2% to 18%), while it was (and still is) quite marginal in CMS (between 1% and 7%). During the last 5 years, we could find the emergence of the Middle East in Mathematics, where we can see a slightly decreasing but still noticeable Eastern European contribution. The contribution curves are far more flat in CMS without considerable involvement of the developing regions of Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. The ratio of involvement of the Global North and the Global South has the same trend in CMS and Mathematics: The contribution of the Global North faintly grows over the years, from 2% to 12% in CMS and from 4% to 14% in Mathematics. These percentages refer to the earliest (1975-1991) and the current (2013-2017) time periods.

In terms of publishers, we found that all the SSCI journals in CMS are in the hands of publishers from the Global North. Half of the periodicals are published in the United States; an additional 39% belong to the United Kingdom and 1% belong to Australia, which means that 90% of the leading journals are from English-speaking countries. A total of 6% of SSCI ranked periodicals in CMS are from the Netherlands, 3% from Germany, and we have 1% Spanish contribution.

Table 1 shows the top 50 countries in CMS in two columns. The left columns count the leading nations between 1975 and 2012, while the right represent the top 50 in the last 5 years only. It is important to note that there were no serious changes in the top three quarters of the list: with minor changes only, the top 40 country remains the same for more than 40 years.

Table 1.

Top 50 Countries in CMS (the Affiliations of the Authors of SSCI Journals in Communication) Between 1975 and 2012 and in the Last 5 Years (2013-2017).

Place	Country (1975-2012)	Share in publication output (%)	n	County (2013-2017)	Share in publication output (%)	n
1	United States	69	6,609	United States	55	3,091
2	England	5	496	England	6.5	366
3	Australia	3	284	Germany	5	270
4	Netherlands	3	279	Australia	4.5	253
5	Canada	3	253	China	4.5	250
6	Spain	2.6	232	Netherlands	4.5	245
7	Germany	2.5	209	Canada	3.3	193
8	China	2	177	Spain	3	173
9	Korea	2	162	Korea	3	169
10	Israel	1.6	114	Sweden	2.5	126
11	Taiwan	1.2	102	Denmark	2	118
12	New Zealand	1	93	Singapore	1.6	110
13	Sweden	1	89	Israel	1.5	90
14	Belgium	1	76	Switzerland	1.5	88
15	Singapore	<1	73	Italy	1.5	84
16	Japan	<1	71	Australia	1.5	83
17	Italy	<1	70	Belgium	1.4	78
18	Finland	<1	64	Finland	1.2	70
19	France	<1	62	New Zealand	1.2	66
20	Switzerland	<1	59	Taiwan	1	62
21	Denmark	<1	58	Norway	1	61
22	Norway	<1	54	South Africa	1	61
23	Scotland	<1	49	Japan	<1	46
24	Wales	<1	42	France	<1	44
25	Austria	<1	40	Chile	<1	38
26	South Africa	<1	37	Portugal	<1	33
27	Slovenia	<1	34	India	<1	28
28	India	<1	28	Turkey	<1	25
29	Ireland	<1	27	Scotland	<1	23
30	Brazil	<1	21	Mexico	<1	20
31	Greece	<1	21	Wales	<1	19
32	Mexico	<1	20	Brazil	<1	18
33	Chile	<1	18	Greece	<1	18
34	Turkey	<1	17	Slovenia	<1	18
35	Hong Kong	<1	16	Malaysia	<1	15
36	United Arab Emirates	<1	16	Ireland	<1	14
37	Malaysia	<1	15	Colombia	<1	13
38	Argentina	<1	12	Czech Republic	<1	12
39	Portugal	<1	12	Poland	<1	12
40	Nigeria	<1	11	Croatia	<1	11
41	Colombia	<1	9	United Arab Emirate	<1	10
42	Croatia	<1	7	Argentina	<1	8
43	Fed Rep Germany	<1	7	Indonesia	<1	8
44	Ghana	<1	7	Serbia	<1	8
45	Iran	<1	7	Qatar	<1	7
46	Philippines	<1	7	Cyprus	<1	6
47	Hungary	<1	6	Kuwait	<1	6
48	North Ireland	<1	6	Philippines	<1	6
49	Thailand	<1	6	Thailand	<1	6
50	Jordan	<1	5	Kenya	<1	5

Note. CMS = Communication and Media Studies; SSCI = social science fields.

The most successful region was, and still is, North America, which published 69% of the articles between 1975 and 2012, but which has been significantly reduced to 55% in the last 5 years (Figure 2). Together with Western Europe, they publish more than three quarters of leading articles in CMS, while developing regions’ share is no more than 2% for each, and it was only 4% altogether between 1975 and 2012, which increased to 7% in the last 5 years. From the list of the top 50 countries, there are 43 with at most 1% contribution. The first 10 countries give more than 90% of the research output in the total time period (1975-2012), which reduced to 76% to the current time period (2013-2017). On the level of world regions, we can see the rising of Western Europe (and, to a less extent, of Asia) with a slight decline in the publication output of North America.

Figure 2.

World regions’ contribution in SSCI journals in communication from 1975 to 2017 and in the last 5 years.

When we made measurements as regards the possible correlations between the top 50 countries’ publication indices and some of their other factors such as GDP, per capita GDP, population, population/publication ratio, GDP/publication ratio, and per capita GDP/publication ratio, we found significant correlations between them (for details, see Table 3 in Online Appendix 6). The most considerable correlation could be found between the publication rate and the per capita GDP of a given country (r = .73, p < .01), but it was also strong with V1, the quotient of the number of publications and population (r = .686, p < .01) and V3, the quotient of the number of publications and per capita GDP (r = .547, p < .01). The only variable with which no significant correlation could be shown is the population of a country (r = –.123, p < .01).

The results of our network analysis in which we analyzed the authors of leading (SSCI Q1-ranked) journals in CMS show an enormous predomination of North America and Western Europe. From the 1,806 authors, we have 833 from North America and 641 from Western Europe. It is more than 82% altogether. Asia (133 authors) and Oceania (103 authors) have a much smaller contribution, followed by the marginal participation of the Middle East (42 authors) and South America (29 authors). The tailenders are Eastern Europe (14 authors) and Africa (11 authors), as their contribution is less than 1% in leading publications in CMS.

On the level of countries, the most successful country is obviously the United States (796 authors), followed by the United Kingdom (133), Spain (105), and Australia (92), from which Spain is the only non-English-language country but, as we will discuss later, 80% of its contribution comes from the Spanish journal Comunicar. In the top 20, only China represents the Global South with its 18 authors, while the Global North has 1,645 authors here.

As we can see in Figure 3, interregional contributions are quite rare. The most frequent collaborations could be found between authors from the same regions: typically, American colleagues cooperate with each other just like Western Europeans, who rarely collaborate with their peers from different regions of the world. However, among interregional contribution, the most common is the cooperation of Western European and North American authors. Asian researchers, who frequently collaborate with each other, sometimes make collaboration with Western European and, to a less extent, with North American colleagues. We have only one extraordinary international article from Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (on the left side of the graph) in which North American, Western European, and Asian authors coworked with researchers from Oceania. As both Asian authors are from the developed regions of the continent (Japan and South Korea), we can see that even this multiregional article lacks authors from the Global South. Graph distribution measures show that the most typical article in our sample is written by two coauthors (300 papers), followed by single-authored papers (280). The sample contains more than 150 articles with three authors, 52 by four, and 26 by five contributors. We still have 10 articles with six authors, but papers with more than six contributors are quite infrequent.

Figure 3.

World regions’ contribution in Q1-ranked SSCI journals in CMS.

Hypotheses

H1 has been confirmed, because data show that a high level of well-being (reflected in high per capita GDP) and a high level of per capita publication correlate with the publication success of a given country. Our findings also confirm H2a as leading journals publish mainly authors from the Global North. Data confirm H2b, too, as Global South authors tend to find alternative ways for publishing their works in prestigious journals. Our third hypothesis (H3a) by which the publication patterns in CMS will resemble patterns in social sciences has been confirmed, because longitudinal research shows similar patterns in the case of the two disciplines. Finally, we found that collaboration between authors from the Global North and the Global South is quite infrequent, and collaboration itself also proved to be relatively rare in CMS, so H3b has been confirmed, too. A detailed analysis of the findings as regards our hypotheses can be found in the section “Discussion.”

Discussion

As contrasted with the Global North, the contribution of the Global South was very low in every discipline, and it was minimal in the case of social sciences and psychology. The lowest contribution could be found in the case of CMS, which could be explained by various reasons. First, we have the importance of language issues. All SSCI journals in CMS publish in English— even the Spanish Comunicar published 100% English articles in 2016. It is rather understandable because articles in English could be reached by the whole scientific community while any other language could be understood by only a part of the academic community, which might lead to lower citation scores and, as a consequence, to a lower rating of the journal. Besides this, in the case of social sciences, psychology and in an even greater extent, in CMS, the medium of the research is at least partly the language itself. We have to make questionnaires, online, personal, or group interviews on a given language, and if it is not English, we could face many problems and difficulties during validation and translation. Moreover, a great part of CMS investigates the language itself: analyzing the language of political communication, the language of the media, or the language of everyday interpersonal dialogues, just to mention a few from the most common topics (Günther & Domahidi, 2017), are all inseparable from the language of the research. This language bias makes the work of authors from nonnative English countries much harder than their native English peers. First of all, they have to learn English as a second language, and they have to be also familiar with academic English, which is, as opposed to the situation of their native English peers, presumably not part of their normal education. We can presume that nonnative English speakers write slower in English, and they have to hire native language editors, or even translators. These latter services could be extraordinary expensive for authors from developing countries. However, all leading periodicals in CMS require articles written in fluent and immaculate (mostly American) English.

Our second explanation could concentrate on the academic infrastructure and tradition. Most parts of the Global South have a democratic transition in the 1980s. It is interesting, however, that many researchers and theorists handle Eastern Europe as part of Europe and the Global North in spite of the fact that, from the perspective of scientometrics, it has much more in common with the Global South. First, Eastern European countries (just like many countries in South America, Africa, Asia, or Middle East) had been oppressed by dictatorships until the end of the ’80s. They could not freely study Western literature, including both scientific articles and popular culture, so they were at least partly excluded from global academic life for 40 years. It is especially true for soft sciences where, as opposed with natural sciences, political ideologies and epistemic values play important roles. Although more than 25 years passed since the transition, many university professors from these fresh democracies have no articles in English at all, not to mention English articles in leading periodicals, and they were trained before the transition so it is questionable if they could successfully assign internationally considerable knowledge to their academic students. Derek Price (1965) estimated that a developing country needs at least three successive academic generations to implement international standards (which, as we have seen, means Western or even American standards). The first generation should be educated in the West, then after returning home, they should teach the next generation to the international standards. The third generation would be the students that learned academic standards from resident professors.

The third explanation relates to the scope of research in CMS. Most study in this field relates to some culture-specific or even country-specific issue, such as political communication of a given political party or candidate, or the analysis of a given media content (of a given platform). Most frequently, communication issues of these kinds should relate to an analysis of media content that is important or interesting for a great number of peer researchers. That is why most topics in CMS are American in focus or relate to other parts of the Western world (Freelon, 2013; Lauf, 2005).

Of course, there are unquestionable connections between the economic state of a given country and its productivity, including scientific products. Our research shows that population, in itself, does not really matter when we consider successful publication patterns. There are countries with enormous population such as India or Brazil that have worse publication rates than relatively small Western countries such as Finland, Norway, or Denmark. That is why we used the variable called V1, which is the quotient of a given country’s publications and its population (per capita publication score). It shows that, for example, China has very low publication scores contrasted with its population (0.018), and the same is true for India (0.0043), Brazil (0.023), Malaysia (0.128), and Russia (0.009). From the Global North, Germany (0.662) and Japan (0.074) seem to be also quite unproductive from this respect. By contrast, the highest per capita publication scores could be found in the Scandinavian countries (2.49-3.39), the Netherlands (3.651), and Australia (3.672). Of course, the most productive countries are those that have rich population and a relatively high per capita publication score, such as the United States (1.95) or the United Kingdom (1.94).

The most significant correlation was found between publication success and per capita GDP (r = .73, p < .01), followed by per capita publication (V1, r = .686, p < .01). The correlation was weaker in the case of nominal GDP (r = .488, p < .01). Based on these correlations, we can assume that those countries that have the highest per capita GDP and per capita publication scores are also the countries with the most successful publication activity in leading CMS. Nominal GDP is not enough in itself, because it could be a consequence of being a huge country with enormous population, such as in the case of China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, or Russia. They are all in that top 15 as regards their nominal GDPs, but the only one is China that is still in the top 15 as regards its publication scores. But if we take a look at the per capita GDPs of different countries, we will find that the first half of the top 50 list has no country from the Global South at all (Slovenia will be the first, in the 26th place). The exceptions are China, South Africa, and Slovenia, because they have relatively low per capita GDPs and relatively high publication scores. Nevertheless, we have a simple explanation here because Slovenia has more than 50% of its scores from Javnost (27 authors), which was—until 2016—a Slovenian journal and still has a Slovenian editor in chief; South African authors publish mostly in Journal of African Media Studies (36 authors), African Journalism Studies (19 authors), and Novi-African Journalism Studies (13 authors), and Chinese authors have their scores mostly from Asian Journal of Communication (31 authors) and Chinese Journal of Communication (28 authors).

The variable V2 shows that there are countries that are very productive in terms of publication compared with their GDPs. The most salient of them are Cyprus (V2 = 13.23) and Slovenia (V2 = 11.12), because they have low GDPs and relatively high publication output. In this regard, the Netherlands, Israel, Finland, Denmark, and Singapore are also very successful, while many classical leading countries in publication perform under the average (3.37) V2 level: the United States, Canada, Korea, China, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, France, and Japan are examples.

When we consider V3, the analysis shows that countries with similar per capita GDP could perform differently as regards their publication output. The most successful of them is obviously the United States (V3 = 110), followed by India (33.6), China (31.7), and the United Kingdom (31.9). Of course, it does not mean that they have the same deal in publication, because while the United States and the United Kingdom have these high V3 values beside high per capita GDP, India and China show high V3 values beside low per capita GDP. However, as similar V3 values show, they would perform the same publication output with the same per capita GDP values, with the exception of the United States, which is extraordinarily successful in this respect. The opposite could be predicated on Ireland (V3 = 1.05), Norway (V3 = 1.88), Switzerland (V3 = 2.39), or Japan (V3 = 2.41).

As a consequence, we could state that a high level of well-being (reflected in high per capita GDP) and a high level of per capita publication correlate with the publication success of a given country (H0). Otherwise, countries with low per capita GDP and/or per capita publication scores would find alternative ways of raising their participation and visibility in international publication: to establish and maintain special, region-sensitive journals. However, some countries are much more successful than their competitors in the production of publications from a given GDP (the Netherlands, Israel, Finland, or Denmark) or per capita GDP (the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and China). It means that, beside the fact that there are strong correlations between publication outputs and some economic variables such as GDP and per capita GDP, there are no single variables that determine the publication success of a given country. Moreover, many specific factors could play important roles here: Israel has very good institutional and academic connections to the United States, and the result of this relationship could be seen in their rather frequent collaboration. At the same time, the Netherlands has a strong tradition in academic publishing as it is the country of Elsevier (which also owns Scopus) and Springer Netherlands. As has been mentioned in the section “Results,” the Netherlands publishes 6% of the periodicals in SSCI.

Turning now to the analyzed journals in CMS between 2013 and 2017, we could state that the above-mentioned phenomena would lead to the emergence of “scientific ghettos,” where internationality ceases to be an important factor. In Q1 and Q2, in the most prestigious categories, we have the United States as the leading country in every case, followed by leading Western European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, except the Spanish Comunicar, where there are almost exclusively Spanish articles (138 authors) without noticeable contribution of American (9 authors), German (3 authors) colleagues, and there are no articles from the Netherlands, Canada, Korea, and Israel at all. The same is true of the German journal Communications, which has 20 authors from Germany, and 14 from the Netherlands, but it lacks articles from the United States, the United Kingdom, or other leading countries of the field. Another German journal, Journal of Media Psychology, also has predominantly German articles. The Dutch Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap, published in English, releases almost exclusively Dutch and Belgian articles without noticeable international contribution. And, as we mentioned above, Asian authors tend to publish in Asian Journal of Communication and Chinese Journal of Communication, just like their African peers who try to place their papers mostly in Journal of African Media Studies, African Journalism Studies, or Novi-African Journalism Studies. Finally, the only Australian journal, Media International Australia publishes articles almost exclusively from Australian authors.

The only exception is Javnost: The Public, which was, until 2016, a Slovenian journal, when it was bought up by Taylor and Francis (United Kingdom). But, although it was an Eastern European journal, it always followed the publication patterns of other Western journals, except that it publishes many Slovenian (but not likely other Eastern European) articles. As a matter of fact, it was a typical Western-focused journal that published many Slovenian papers, and as data show, it never worked as a hub for the Eastern European region. Now, because it is published by Taylor and Francis (United Kingdom), it has become part of the Global North with a seamless transition, and, since 2016, no country of the Global South has any communication journals indexed in SSCI.

Considering the most prestigious group of articles that have been published in 2016 in SSCI Q1-ranked CMS journals, we find an even greater imbalance of publication patterns than it was in the case of all SSCI articles (from Q1 to Q4). Almost 60% of the research articles are published by authors from the four English-speaking countries (the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada) and the Global North’s contribution is more than 97% altogether. As we can see on Figure 3, there is no place for authors from Southern countries, excluding the minimal contribution of China and South Africa, which could be almost exclusively taken in journals specialized for Asian or African issues. Interregional contribution is quite infrequent, but if it happens, it is almost exclusively between Northern country authors.

Before our research, we formulated three hypotheses. As has been already mentioned, a high level of well-being (reflected in high per capita GDP) and a high level of per capita publication correlate with the publication success of a given country, which confirms our first hypothesis (H1). As regards H2a, we could confirm that leading journals (published exclusively by the Global North) publish mainly authors from the Global North. We suggested, however, that researchers from developing countries would try to seek alternative ways for publishing their papers in highly cited, indexed journals (H2b). We found that there are at least two appropriate ways. The first is much easier: They have to find a journal with specialized geographical focus such as in the case of Asian Journal of Communication (AJC), Chinese Journal of Communication (CJC), or African Journalism Studies (AJS). In the case of AJC, there is a very strong Asian contribution: Besides 172 American authors, we have 61 articles from Korea, 34 from Hong Kong, 45 from China, 36 from Singapore, 28 from Taiwan, 13 from India and Malaysia, and even 6 from Indonesia. In CJC, we can find an even more Asian preference: Most of the papers are produced by authors from China and Hong Kong (98), followed by 65 American authors. AJS is rife with authors from South Africa (31), followed by their British (15) and American (12) peers, and the same pattern could be seen in the case of Journal of African Media Studies, where we have 48 South African authors followed by 27 British and 19 American contributors. Our last example is Ecquid Novi-African Journalism Studies, where we have 109 South African authors besides 75 American and 17 British scholars. Data show that China publishes almost 20% of its papers in Chinese-themed periodicals, while this ratio is 38% in the case of South Africa. The second possibility is not to find, but to establish, a journal and try to maintain its internationality besides publishing a great amount of native research such as in the case of Comunicar or Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap. In Comunicar, we have 330 authors from Spain, followed by only 29 American scholars. With this, Spain publishes almost 30% of its total contribution in SSCI-ranked CMS journals in this sole periodical. In the case of Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap, 131 Dutch authors are followed by 67 Belgian scholars, and these two sets of authors gives the 97% of the total research output. But we should mention that Spanish, German, or Dutch authors do not come upon publishing in their own journals because their contribution (especially those of the German and Dutch) are quite noticeable without these native papers. The opposite is true of their Slovenian colleagues, whose contribution would be far narrower without their (formerly Slovenian) Javnost. In this periodical, 111 American and 93 British authors are followed by 79 Slovenian authors, which means that Slovenia produces more than 50% of its research output in Javnost. It seems, however, that the more successful a journal is, the more likely it will be bought up by a great international publishing house from the Global North, so it is an open question if Slovenian researchers would publish their papers in Javnost in the future to the same extent that they did in the past.

Our third hypothesis (H3a) by which the publication patterns in CMS will resemble patterns in social sciences has been confirmed, because longitudinal research shows similar patterns in the case of the two disciplines. However, CMS publication pattern is more parallel to that of psychology. In these two patterns, we could find the enormous advantage of the United States, followed by Western Europe, and a relatively important contribution of Australia and New Zealand, with almost unnoticeable cooperation of Eastern Europe, Africa, or the Middle East. For a possible explanation of the fact that publication patterns in CMS and in psychology are quite similar, consider that (a) international coauthorship patterns vary by subject discipline, (b) cooperation usually raises the quality of the research, and (c) coauthorship with an author from the Global North raises the chance of being published. We could conjecture that the publication patterns of disciplines with the same collaboration habits will be similar. Because, from our current research, we already know that the publication patterns of psychology and CMS are rather similar, we just have to take a look at the international collaboration habits of the two disciplines. In the STM Report, we could find that among many analyzed disciplines from astronomy to social sciences, it was really psychology that had the least global coauthored articles in 1997, and its position slightly improved until 2012 (Ware & Mabe, 2015, p. 43). We measured the same low level of global coauthorship in CMS by which we could confirm that the international diversity of publication output correlates with the level of international coauthorship. We also found that collaboration between authors from the Global North and the Global South is quite infrequent, and collaboration itself also proved to be relatively rare in CMS, so H3b has been confirmed, too. Single-authored articles and papers by two authors were the most frequent types of research papers, and interregional articles were quite rare in both the Global North and the Global South. Thus—as dependency theories suggest—Global South authors depend on the Global North institutions in many ways to publish their research on international level. First, the confirmation of H2a shows, publishing from the Global North is far more easy than publishing from the Global South. Therefore, many talented researchers from the latter region would tend to move to the Global North in the hope of finding a Western affiliation. Second, Global South authors tend to strategically cooperate with Western scholars to publish coauthored articles. Finally, Global South authors also depend on the main topical clusters and other academic settings determined by the Global North.

Limitations of the Study

In any research, we should stipulate the level of complexity. In the case of our analysis, this level was established by defining core variables. Regarding the country of the analyzed articles, in accordance with the method of WoS, we decided to indicate only the country of the affiliation of the first author. If coauthors were included, this calculation would become even more complex. Some scholars in the Global South deliberately cooperate with Global North scholars hoping to improve their chances of success in publishing, even when they are the driving researchers of the study. But since neither Scopus nor WoS takes coauthors into account when defining the country of a given article, we decided to do the same. In spite of this, when we analyzed coauthorship networks in SSCI Q1 journals in 2016, we considered coauthors on a smaller pattern of 825 articles and found that international collaboration between authors from the Global North and the Global South are quite infrequent: We found only 23 instances (2.8%).

Another limitation is that we considered only the current affiliation of a given author and not his or her country of origin. As is well known, there are many scholars in the Global North from abroad: They were born and in some cases trained in the Global South. While we expressly think that an analysis that deals with the career of internationally recognized non-Western scholars in CMS would be beneficial, we should also remind the research by Wiedemann and Meyen (2016). The authors investigated the career of non-U.S. fellows and presidents of the International Communication Association (ICA) and found that “Almost all ICA presidents and fellows working outside the United States were either educated at U.S. universities or heavily influenced by U.S.-based academic approaches” (Wiedemann & Meyen, 2016, p. 1489). Among the 26 non-U.S. fellows, there were only two without obvious institutional connections with the United States, and both of them work in Western Europe. So, we could conjecture that institutional connections (Western education, guest professorships, and so on) would play a more important role than nationality or place of birth.

Conclusion

As a general conclusion, we state that both the Matthew-effect for countries and the large inequalities between the scientific contributions of world regions still exist on the field of CMS. What is more, inequalities in CMS are much greater than not just those of natural sciences but even greater than the inequalities in philosophy or social sciences. Our research also shows that economic factors and academic culture play a crucial role in the scientific output of a given country. The most significant correlation was found between the per capita GDP and the publication output. Moreover, countries with established academic and publishing traditions, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, would perform much better than those countries without similar experiences.

National journals and regional focus also play an important part in the publication output of world regions and individual countries. Typical examples for national journals of this kind are German, Spanish, and Dutch periodicals that give a large part of the corresponding country’s publication output to regional work. Beside national journals, we could speak of journals with a regional focus. Among SSCI communication journals, we have periodicals with Asian and African foci, and most of the authors of these regions publish mostly in these thematic periodicals. Because Southern countries with low per capita GDP, linguistic, epistemic, training, and cultural differences have only a minimal chance to publish in leading journals, authors from these regions tend to look for alternative ways such as publishing in nonindexed or even predatory journals or establishing their own high-quality periodicals. But while the former is unethical and maladaptive, the second is only slightly better because, instead of widening international scientific communities, native journals establish and maintain academic hubs with only regional significance.

Supplemental Material

DS_10.1177_1077699018792270 – Supplemental material for The Winner Takes It All: International Inequality in Communication and Media Studies Today

Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_1077699018792270 for The Winner Takes It All: International Inequality in Communication and Media Studies Today by Marton Demeter in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental Material

The online appendices are available online at .

Author Biography

Marton Demeter is an associate professor of communication and media studies at the Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary and a Bolyai Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His main areas of research are global inequality in academic participation, the systematic biases towards global South authors in social sciences and the analysis of social capital. He is also the founder and co-editor in chief of KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry that is one of the leading communication journal of the Central and Eatern European region.

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