The field of communication is becoming less disruptive: analyses of citation data over four decades

Abstract Innovation is fundamental to knowledge advancement in all realms of scholarship. The current study focuses on 2 forms of innovation in communication, as manifested via citation practices: consolidation and disruption. This study examines whether the field of communication has become consolidative or disruptive over time and projects the near-future trajectory of consolidation and disruption. Based on 92 communication journals and their citation data spanning from 1976 to 2022, our citation analyses of 52,294 focal publications suggested that communication research is overall disruptive. However, the level of disruption has been declining over time. Our linguistic analyses of article titles and abstracts further confirm the decreasing disruption in the field. Overall, this study suggests a deceleration in innovation within the field of communication, which serves as a sign that communication has been solidifying its status as an increasingly independent field, grounded in a growing body of shared intellectual legacy. We further interpreted the change in innovation from the perspectives of theory building, knowledge burden, journal scopes, academic platforms, and recent advances in artificial intelligence and large language models.