Prioritizing research topics in professional communication

Within the professional communication field, the gap between academics, who do most of the research, and practitioners, who might make use of those research results, is well known. Prior research has shown that, although practitioners place a high value on research, they read little of it. This paper reports efforts to address one possible cause of this problem by establishing the importance of nine research topic areas, six data collection methods/sources, and three data analysis methods for both academics and practitioners. The research involves a survey of subscribers to the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. The results of this survey effort are to be publicized in an effort to encourage researchers to pursue those projects deemed most important.