COM 5223: Small Group Communication (Dixson)

A research guide for Dr. Mary Dixson's graduate course.

Key Communication and Interdisciplinary Journals

Key journals in communication and related disciplines are linked below. Browsing journals is a good way to get ideas of topics discussed by communication scholars and to explore topics that you could use for this class.

Click a tab below to browse journals by broad category.
After selecting a journal, select "Available Online" in Library Quick Search in order to access the full journal from the UTSA Libraries.
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Key Communication Journals by Area

Communication Research Reports
Contains original empirical research in the form of brief articles on a variety of topics of human communication:
interpersonal, organizational, communication traits, intercultural, nonverbal, small group, health, persuasion, mass, political, relational, computer mediated, and life-span.
Computers in Human Behavior
Original theoretical works, research reports, literature reviews, software reviews, book reviews and announcements. It addresses both the use of computers in psychology, psychiatry and related disciplines as well as the psychological impact of computer use on individuals, groups and society.
Human Communication Research
Human Communication Research is one of the official journals of the prestigious International Communication Association and is read by more than 3,500 of its members. It is a top-ranked communication studies journal and one of the top ten journals in the field of human communication. Major topic areas for the journal include language and social interaction, nonverbal communication, interpersonal communication, organizational communication and new technologies, mass communication, health communication, intercultural communication, and developmental issues in communication.
International Journal of Communication
An online, multi-media, academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The International Journal of Communication is an interdisciplinary journal that, while centered in communication, is open and welcoming to contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that meet at the crossroads that is communication study.
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly
JMCQ is the flagship journal of the AEJMC. This quarterly, peer-reviewed journal is ranked in Journal Citation Reports and focuses on research in journalism and mass communication. Established in 1924, it is the oldest refereed scholarly journal in mass communication and provides leadership in scholarship for the field.
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media
A quarterly journal that presents timely research articles about new developments, trends, and innovations in electronic and digital communication to advance scholarly discoveries and real-world solutions.
Journal of Communication
The Journal of Communication (JOC) is the flagship journal of the International Communication Association. It focuses on communication research, practice, policy, and theory. The journal is a general forum for communication scholarship and focuses on intra-disciplinary research and related sub-fields.
Mass Communication and Society
Publish articles on a wide variety of topics that advance mass communication theory, especially at the societal or macrosocial level. It publishes original articles and book reviews on topics related to mass media practices, content, effects, messages, and research methods. Includes both qualitative and quantitative research with an emphasis on social-scientist perspectives.
New Media and Society
Engages in critical discussions of the key issues arising from the scale and speed of new media development, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and on both theoretical and empirical research.

AIDS Care
An international peer-reviewed journal publishing multi-disciplinary research related to HIV/AIDS including the planning of services, prevention and the social and psychological aspects of care and treatment.
American Journal of Public Health
Dedicated to publication of original work in research, research methods, and program evaluation in the field of public health. The Journal also regularly publishes editorials and commentaries and serves as a forum for health policy analysis. The mission of the Journal is to advance public health research, policy, practice, and education.
Critical Public Health
An international peer reviewed journal that publishes critically engaged research in public health, health promotion and related fields.
Culture, Health and Sexuality
Publishes internationally relevant, cutting edge research on culture, health and sexuality.
Frontiers in Communication
Publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research in areas including Political, Health, Culture, and Science and Environmental Communication. Led by an outstanding Editorial Board of international experts, this multidisciplinary open-access journal is at the forefront of disseminating and communicating knowledge and impactful discoveries to researchers, academics, policy makers and the public worldwide.
Global Health Promotion
An official publication of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE). It is a multilingual journal, which publishes authoritative peer-reviewed articles and practical information in English, French and Spanish for a world-wide audience of professionals interested in health promotion and health education.
Global Public Health
An international journal that publishes research on public health including the social and cultural aspects of global health issues.
Also addresses public health issues such as epidemics of newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, the globalization of trade and the increase in chronic illnesses.
Health Communication
A mostly data-based journal, that also publishes pedagogical, methodological, theoretical, and applied articles using both quantitative or qualitative methods.
Journal of Applied Communication Research
Contains original and theoretical research articles that contribute to knowledge about how people practice communication across diverse applied contexts.
Journal of Health Communication
A journal that covers the communication of health information globally
Qualitative Health Research
Provides an international, interdisciplinary forum to enhance health care and further the development and understanding of qualitative research in health-care settings.
Social Science and Medicine
Provides an international and interdisciplinary forum for the dissemination of social science research on health. Includes original research articles (both empirical and theoretical), reviews, position papers and commentaries on health issues, to inform current research, policy and practice in all areas of common interest to social scientists, health practitioners, and policy makers.

International Journal of Intercultural Relations
Dedicated to advancing knowledge and understanding of theory, research and practice in the field of intercultural relations, including, but not limited to, topics such as immigrant acculturation and integration; intergroup relations, and intercultural communication that have implications for social impact. The journal publishes quantitative and qualitative empirical research and reviews of research literature.
Journal of Applied Communication Research
Contains original and theoretical research articles that contribute to knowledge about how people practice communication across diverse applied contexts.
Journal of Intercultural Communication Research
A journal that focuses on interrelationships between culture and communication.
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication
A peer-reviewed journal of original scholarship that expands understanding of international, intercultural, and cross-cultural communication.
Journal of Language and Social Psychology
A journal focusing on social psychology and language, featuring original full-length articles, short research notes and book reviews.

Communication Monographs
Features theoretically grounded research dealing with human symbolic exchange across the broad spectrum of interpersonal, group, organizational, cultural and mediated contexts in which such activities occur.
Human Communication Research
Human Communication Research is one of the official journals of the prestigious International Communication Association and is read by more than 3,500 of its members. It is a top-ranked communication studies journal and one of the top ten journals in the field of human communication. Major topic areas for the journal include language and social interaction, nonverbal communication, interpersonal communication, organizational communication and new technologies, mass communication, health communication, intercultural communication, and developmental issues in communication.
Journal of Applied Communication Research
Contains original and theoretical research articles that contribute to knowledge about how people practice communication across diverse applied contexts.
Journal of Family Communication
Publishes original, theoretically grounded and methodologically rigorous scholarship that advances the understanding of the communication processes within or about families as well as research that addresses issues related to the intersection between family communication and social systems, such as mass media, education, health care, and law and policy.
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
A journal of original research on social and personal relationships. It publishes empirical and theoretical papers on social and personal relationships. It is multidisciplinary in scope, drawing material from the fields of social psychology, clinical psychology, communication, developmental psychology, and sociology.
Small Group Research
This journal offers the latest research, theory and empirically supported applications. It is devoted to increasing communication among specialists who are interested in the systematic study of small groups and small group phenomena.

Academy of Management Review
Publishes theoretical insights that advance our understanding of management and organizations.
Communication Monographs
Features theoretically grounded research dealing with human symbolic exchange across the broad spectrum of interpersonal, group, organizational, cultural and mediated contexts in which such activities occur.
Gender, Work, and Organization
This journal publishes multi-disciplinary, high quality qualitative empirical research on gendered power relations and identities in the study of work and organization exploring issues of inclusion and exclusion. It publishes quantitative work guided by critical epistemologies on issues such as the gender pay gap, flexible work, career patterns, women on boards and access to leadership positions.
Human Relations
An international peer reviewed journal publishing the highest quality original research to advance our understanding of social relationships at and around work.
International Journal of Business Communication
Contains original research articles that contribute to knowledge and theory of business communication.
Journal of Applied Communication Research
Contains original and theoretical research articles that contribute to knowledge about how people practice communication across diverse applied contexts.
Management Communication Quarterly
A peer-reviewed quarterly that publishes research from across the organizational and management communication fields.
Management Learning
A fully peer-reviewed journal which welcomes contributions from management and organization studies and related fields and disciplines, as well as papers adopting multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.
Organization
The major forum for dialogue and innovation in organization studies, addressing significant current and emergent theoretical, meta theoretical and substantive developments in the field.
Organization Studies
Published in collaboration with the European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS), is a global, peer-reviewed journal that promotes the understanding of organizations, organizing and the organized, and the societal relevance of that understanding.

Gender and Society
Promotes feminist scholarship and the social scientific study of gender and publishes theoretically engaged and methodologically rigorous articles that make original contributions to gender theory. The journal takes a multidisciplinary, intersectional, and global approach to gender analyses.
Women's Studies in Communication
Povides a feminist forum for diverse research, reviews, and commentary addressing the relationships between communication and gender.
Women and Language
Peer-reviewed journal for the Study of Communication Language and Gender

Key Journals by Association and Region

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
CC/CS publishes original scholarship that situates culture as a site of struggle and communication as an enactment and discipline of power. The journal features critical inquiry that cuts across academic and theoretical boundaries. CC/CS welcomes a variety of methods including textual, discourse, and rhetorical analyses alongside auto/ethnographic, narrative, and poetic inquiry.
Communication Education
Communication Education publishes original scholarship that advances understanding of the role of communication in the teaching and learning process in diverse spaces, structures, and interactions, within and outside of academia.
Communication Monographs
Features theoretically grounded research dealing with human symbolic exchange across the broad spectrum of interpersonal, group, organizational, cultural and mediated contexts in which such activities occur.
Critical Studies in Media Communication
CSMC publishes original scholarship in mediated and mass communication from a cultural studies and/or critical perspective. It particularly welcomes submissions that enrich debates among various critical traditions, methodological and analytical approaches, and theoretical standpoints.
Journal of Applied Communication Research
Contains original and theoretical research articles that contribute to knowledge about how people practice communication across diverse applied contexts.
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication
A peer-reviewed journal of original scholarship that expands understanding of international, intercultural, and cross-cultural communication.
Quarterly Journal of Speech
A peer-reviewed publication of the National Communication Association. The journal publishes original scholarship and book reviews that take a rhetorical approach to diverse texts, discourses, and cultural practices through which public beliefs, norms, identities, institutions, affects, and actions are constituted, empowered, enacted, and circulated.
Review of Communication
The Review of Communication publishes original scholarship that advances the discipline and practice of communication through the study of major themes that cross disciplinary subfields. The Review of Communication welcomes essays that build theory, advance our
understanding of a method, extend or challenge a current paradigm, bridge a divide, clarify a term or concept, or demonstrate a pragmatic function.
Text and Performance Quarterly
TPQ publishes original scholarship that explores and advances the study of performance
as a social, critical, communicative practice; as a theoretical lens; as a critical method; as a
technology of representation and expression; and as a hermeneutic. Scholarship in TPQ
addresses performance and the performative from a wide range of perspectives and
methodologies, and it investigates sites of performance from the classical stage to popular
culture to the practices of everyday life.

Annals of the International Communication Association
Formerly the Communication Yearbook, the Annals of the International Communication Association is a peer-reviewed quarterly
journal publishing state-of-the-discipline literature reviews and essays, including: descriptive reviews; meta-analyses; and theoretical essays.
Communication, Culture and Critique
Provides an international forum for critical research in communication, media, and cultural studies. We welcome high-quality research and analyses that place questions of power, inequality, and justice at the center of empirical and theoretical inquiry. CCC seeks to bring a diversity of critical approaches (political economy, feminist analysis, critical race theory, postcolonial critique, cultural studies, queer theory) to bear on the role of communication, media, and culture in power dynamics on a global scale.
Communication Theory
Covers original communication research from an international perspective and includes articles on the theoretical development of communication from a wide array of disciplines.
Journal of Communication
The Journal of Communication (JOC) is the flagship journal of the International Communication Association. It focuses on communication research, practice, policy, and theory. The journal is a general forum for communication scholarship and focuses on intra-disciplinary research and related sub-fields.
Human Communication Research
Human Communication Research is one of the official journals of the prestigious International Communication Association and is read by more than 3,500 of its members. It is a top-ranked communication studies journal and one of the top ten journals in the field of human communication. Major topic areas for the journal include language and social interaction, nonverbal communication, interpersonal communication, organizational communication and new technologies, mass communication, health communication, intercultural communication, and developmental issues in communication.
Journal of Computer Mediated Communication
Its focus is social science research on communicating with computer-based media technologies. Within that general purview, the journal is broadly interdisciplinary, publishing work by scholars in communication, business, education, political science, sociology, psychology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines.

Note that all journals in this category publish empirical research that spans across multiple subfields and different methodological approaches

Communication Quarterly
Features research reports, critical studies, state of the art reviews, reports of topical interest, supported opinion papers, and other essays related to the interest groups of ECA and its affiliate organizations.
Communication Studies
Communication Studies contains articles focused on communication processes.
Southern Communication Journal
The nationally and internationally read scholarly publication of the Southern States Communication Association (SSCA). The Southern Communication Journal publishes original scholarship that makes significant contributions to understanding the processes and consequences of human communication. The journal is not limited with regard to topic, methodological approach, or theoretical perspective, although authors must establish the significance of the research, soundness of methodological choices, and appropriateness of theoretical perspectives.
Western Journal of Communication
One of two scholarly journals of the Western States Communication Association (WSCA). The journal is dedicated to the publication of original scholarship that enhances an understanding of human communication. Contains both theoretical and original research article from many perspectives: rhetorical and media studies, interpersonal and intercultural communication, critical and cultural studies, language behavior, performance studies, small group and organizational communication, freedom of speech, and health and family communication.