Mapping Political Communication Research Before the Pandemic Scopus-Based Scientometric and Thematic Overview (2000–2019)

Absztrakt

This study maps the field of political communication research between 2000 and 2019 using scientometric and text-mining tools, with the specific aim of establishing a “pre- 2020” baseline. The author analyzes a corpus of 2,306 journal articles drawn from the Scopus database, in which the term “political communication” appears in the title, abstract, or keywords. The study integrates three dimensions simultaneously: (1) the description of publication dynamics and authorship patterns, (2) the identification of geographical focuses based on country mentions in the abstracts, and (3) the exploration of methodological indications and thematic structure. In addition to metadata analysis, the study employs natural language processing and topic modeling to identify five major thematic clusters from titles and abstracts. The results show that the number of publications in the sample increased notably in the 2010s, and the trend is statistically significant. In terms of geographical focus, a marked Western concentration emerges: the United States is the dominant reference and empirical field, while several regions (a significant part of Latin America, Africa, and many countries in Eastern Europe) are underrepresented. At the same time, the visibility of non-Western cases is increasing (for example, the emergence of China and India), signaling the gradual globalization of the field of research. Based on methodological indications, quantitative approaches are the most common, while qualitative and mixed-methods approaches are also present, and a trend toward pluralism is evident toward the end of the 2000s. An important finding of the study is that a significant portion of the abstracts still fail to make the methodology clear, pointing to a persistent problem with research transparency. The topic modeling identifies five major clusters: (1) media effects, information, and data-driven approaches; (2) media framing, journalistic practices, and European contexts; (3) campaigns, party politics, and platform use (particularly Twitter/Facebook); (4) theoretical and methodological reflections, discourse, and political rhetoric; (5) digital and social media, governance, and public participation. Together, these clusters show that by the end of the period, digital/platform logic becomes one of the organizing axes of the field, while classic issues of media effects and framing do not disappear.

Overall, the study provides a reproducible, pre-pandemic reference point for research on political communication, against which post-2020 “disruptive” claims can be more accurately assessed. The author sees the main contribution in the fact that it links publication trends, geographical focuses, methodological approaches, and thematic structure within a single, unified analytical framework, thereby also highlighting the blind spots in the field.