Two Decades of Journalism Studies: Authorship, Networks and Diversity

Abstract Representation and diversity are salient issues in the democratic discourse worldwide and by extension within the field of journalism studies. With the field’s recent introspection into the role of gender and race in academia came a need for empirical data, supporting the efforts of scholars working on improving journalism study’s diversity, both in terms of gender and affiliation nationality. The current study aims at adding to this ongoing research by investigating the diversity among the authors of three major journalism related journals from 2000–2020, by employing automated content analysis and network analysis on a corpus of 2,751 original research articles. The results illustrate how authors’ characteristics impact a fields output. We find historic and ongoing imbalances among authors of different genders and affiliation nationality that have an impact on the field’s knowledge production.