Abstract
Recent reviews describe academic scholarship on environmental communication as a subdiscipline of communication studies focused on mass media. However, these reviews may not provide a full picture of the field. We searched one of the most comprehensive citation databases (Scopus) for articles published from 1970 to 2019 containing the root terms environment* communicat*. The dataset (n = 474) revealed an increase over time in the number of journals that publish environmental communication studies and the breadth of their National Science Foundation disciplinary categorizations. Climate communication, corporate social responsibility, and public engagement and participation represent the most frequent abstract topics. Through co-citation analysis of journals cited in references, we found that the foundational literatures informing the field have grown into dense, interconnected networks across disparate areas of scholarship that span the social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and business. This disciplinary convergence is a positive sign for the field’s potential to address problems of societal importance.
Highlights
The provost at a large university once commented that communication and statistics have something in common
The purpose of this study is to map the academic field of environmental communication from 1970–2019 to assess how it may have changed over the intervening decades through a bibliometric analysis of its citations
We conducted descriptive statistics on the data set and social network analyses on the references cited by each article for the periods 1970–1989, 1990–1999, 2000–2009, and 2010–2019. (The first 2 decades were combined for the purposes of the analysis as they contain very few articles.) We ran co-citation data by year in conjunction with each journal’s National Science Foundation (NSF) disciplinary categorization
Summary
The provost at a large university once commented that communication and statistics have something in common. They are both such important and useful subjects, he said, that every department wants to research and teach them. 16) define this subject expansively as “the pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment as well as our relationships to the natural world.”. If, as this definition states, environmental communication provides human beings with a way to make sense of the physical and natural world, academic interest in this topic might span myriad disciplines. The provost’s observation might apply to environmental communication. Cox and Pezzullo (2015, p. 16) define this subject expansively as “the pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment as well as our relationships to the natural world.” If, as this definition states, environmental communication provides human beings with a way to make sense of the physical and natural world, academic interest in this topic might span myriad disciplines. Cox and Depoe (2015) say as much, noting environmental communication gives rise to not just many audiences and potential communication goals, and to associated academic areas of study
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