(11), Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, Ohio State, Amsterdam, Oxford, and, in Singapore, Nanyang Technological University (10).
This domination of the research influences the language that predominates in the articles. Ninety-one percent of production is in English (487 articles), while Spanish comes a long way behind with 41 articles (7.6%). With insignificant percentages there are three articles in German, another three in Russian, one in Slovene, and another in Catalan.
In keeping with the geographical distribution of universities, the countries that show the greatest number of academic publications related to the issue (Table 1.2) are led by the United States (45.5% of the articles analyzed), followed by the United Kingdom (11.8%) and Spain (11%). Nonetheless, the proof that disinformation is a global and widespread concern lies in the fact that the investigations originate from some fifty countries, amongst which the European continent takes on an important role as 45.8% of those countries are located there.
Table 1.2 The 10 countries that produce thegreatest volume of articles related to disinformation
| Country | Matches | % |
|---|---|---|
| USA | 249 | 46.5 |
| United Kingdom | 63 | 11.8 |
| Spain | 59 | 11.0 |
| Australia | 27 | 5.0 |
| Germany | 27 | 5.0 |
| Netherlands | 21 | 3.9 |
| Canada | 16 | 2.9 |
| Singapore | 13 | 2.4 |
| Denmark | 12 | 2.2 |
| Switzerland | 12 | 2.2 |
The total number of journals from the Communication field that have published research related to disinformation is 64. Journals housing more than 5% of the total publications were considered to be the most committed to this issue; making calls for special issues has an influence on this. The most active are El Profesional de la Información and Social Media + Society, which surpass thirty registers each, New Media & Society and the International Journal of Communication (26), and Digital Journalism (24). Journalism Practice (23), Information, Communication & Society, and Political Communication (20) come close to these figures.
The exponential growth experienced in recent years by studies on disinformation has also had a positive influence on their impact. As a general figure, the average number of citations in other high impact publications obtained per article in Web of Science is 8.6. Table 1.3 shows the five most-cited articles, characterized by their addressing contexts and employing diverse methodologies, although politics is the central pivot in three of the investigations. The most referenced amongst them is “The Daily Show: Discursive integration and the reinvention of political journalism” (Baym 2005), a classic case study of the discipline that pioneered the use of “fake news.” Close behind is a recently published conceptual investigation, the work of Tandoc et al. (2018) titled “Defining fake news: A typology of scholarly definitions,” which in only two years has achieved 219 citations, thanks to the taxonomy proposed. The third article is an essay that analyzes Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and concludes that his success is due to simple, impulsive, and uncivil discourses (Ott 2017). The fourth place is occupied by Engesser et al. (2017), who develop a qualitative study on the rise of populism on Facebook and Twitter comparing four scenarios: Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. Also on this list is an article that, by employing experimental techniques based on exposing users to misinformation content, evaluates the cognitive processes involved in processing verification and analyzes the incidence of corrections in the perception of news (Bode and Vraga 2015).
Table 1.3 Most-cited articles (total accumulated citations)
| Article | Authors | Journal | Year | Total citations | Average citations per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Daily Show: Discursive integration and the reinvention of political journalism | Baym, Geoffrey | Political Communication | 2005 | 229 | 14.3 |
| Defining fake news: A typology of scholarly definition | Tandoc Jr., Edson C.; Lim, Zheng Wei; Ling, Richard | Digital Journalism | 2018 | 219 | 73 |
| The age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement | Ott, Brian L. | Critical Studies in Media Communication | 2017 | 128 | 32 |
| Populism and social media: How politicians spread a fragmented ideology | Engesser, Sven; Ernst, Nicole; Esser, Frank; Buechel, Florin | Information Communication & Society | 2017 | 125 | 31.3 |
| In related news, that was wrong: The correction of misinformation through related stories functionality in social media | Bode, Leticia; Vraga, Emily K. | Journal of Communication | 2015 | 92 | 15.3 |
With respect to the analysis of co-citation, implemented with the VOS viewer application, five research clusters can be observed, connected by Edson Tandoc as the central node (Figure 1.2 ).
Figure 1.2 Research clusters concerning disinformation.
