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The circulation of newspapers that have both a "paper version" and a "free digital" version is analysed to determine whether there is a relationship between the two kinds of circulation. If there is an existing relationship we want to know how it works, what the overall effects are, and if these effects create some form of "cannibalization". We studied the leading "free digital" publications in Spain for general information (El mundo), sports (Marca), and economics (Expansión). Sources for extracting data are Introl, OJD and OJD Interactiva. Data analysis was based on a descriptive statistics methodology and monthly series over 10 years, starting in June 1998, the first available date for electronic editions of these three newspapapers. The last month analysed is December 2008 because OJD Interactiva modified its measurement methods in January 2009 and this change could have affected the study results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first review of selective exposure studies in Spain, offering comprehensive insights into the diverse findings and analytical strategies employed over almost three decades by studies that explore the politically oriented media consumption of Spanish audiences. The article divides the evolution of this research line in Spain into two main phases -an initial phase (1995-2016) and a consolidation phase (2017-present)- according to the methodological approaches used during each period. Despite the challenges posed by working with secondary data and the lack of experimental designs, we note a robust initiation of this research line in Spain, accompanied by increasing methodological sophistication and diversification and a substantial accumulation of evidence on how Spanish audiences selectively consume like-minded news media. The paper also identifies the blind spots of selective exposure research in Spain, such as the scarcity of primary data sources, which overlooks phenomena such as online selective exposure and selective avoidance, the need to supplement multivariate analyses with other techniques that allow the direction of causal influence between variables to be established, and the significance of assessing the role of public media as facilitators or inhibitors of cross-cutting exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fact checking is becoming an essential journalistic task because of the proliferation of misinformative content disseminated massively through social media and other channels. Based on this observation, the fundamental objective of the research that serves as the basis for this paper was to learn about the Spanish journalists' professional routines and training in fact-checking. The authors developed a 29-item questionnaire distributed via email to journalists nationwide between May and June 2023 to collect the information. We obtained 326 responses, resulting in several findings: a) the implementation of data verification is not uniform, being more frequent in some types of media --newspapers and verification platforms-- and in large corporations; b) workload is an obstacle that prevents most journalists from devoting as much time to verification as it would require; c) some areas generate more problems when it comes to cross-checking data --such as politics and economics--; d) the preferred sources for verification are academic and official sources --governments, state security forces-; e) the digital tools that are known or used by professionals still have low penetration rates, with only some exceptions; f) although the perception of the respondents is that they are sufficiently trained for verification work, only a minority have received specific training in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convictions of political corruption depend on public communication, since for citizens, to perceive deviant behaviours, these must receive attention. In Spain, this type of behaviour is part of the agendas of citizens, media, and politicians and, to fight against it, accountability is essential. In addition to the judiciary and legislature (in their oversight role), the media and social media help voters, MPs and others to make informed decisions and press for action. However, the interrelationships between different agents, types, and forms of control for accountability are a rather unexplored research topic, especially when considering non-accountable institutions (those that have power, but are not directly accountable to the electorate, such as the monarchy). The debate on the inviolability of the emeritus presents a perfect scenario to describe what formulas and what kind of sanctions (legal, labour, reputational or personal) for accountability have occurred in Spain in the case of a non-accountable institution. This study explores the agendas of media, Parliament, and Twitter (and their inter-influences) during the Geneva papers scandal. We analyzed 189,037 tweets, 1,220 journalistic pieces and 78 parliamentary initiatives related to the former monarch. The main results show that the media, social networks, and Parliament have acted as agents of accountability with Juan Carlos I, as if it were an accountable institution. Online newspapers and Twitter have led the oversight, while the parliamentary initiative has been ineffective and has essentially served as an instrument of partisan communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes an important contribution to comparative research by examining data journalism in Spain and Austria. This paper examines the practice of data journalism from a triple perspective: (a) the common features of day-to-day work, (b) the organizational structure and the role of the teams in newsrooms, and (c) the obstacles to and the future of data-driven reporting. Results from content analysis of data-driven news stories in El país and Der standard (N = 136) show differences and similarities in the covered topics, sources, narrative style, visualizations, interactive functions, and levels of transparency. Interestingly, only 36.8% of the analyzed news stories correspond to the normative expectations of transparency by incorporating both sources and methodological details. While the Spanish newspaper shows significantly higher levels of transparency compared with the Austrian newspaper, both newspapers perform very similarly when it comes to providing access to raw data, which was the case in only every fifth news story analyzed. Findings from focused interviews with the heads of data journalism teams deliver interesting insights into specific challenges that each news outlet is facing when creating day-to-day data-driven news stories. This research confirms the relevance that data journalism has achieved in countries such as Spain and demonstrates the effort of journalists in countries without access to information and transparency laws to create data-driven stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to dissect the presence of female writers in the main four cultural supplements of Spanish reference press: Babelia (El país), Cultura/s (La vanguardia), El cultural (El mundo) and ABC cultural (ABC). For this, we analyzed the "books of the year" recommended between 2010 and 2021 (n = 1,286), as well as the juries in charge of elaborating these ranks. The results show the subsidiary role reserved for women in this sphere of cultural information: they barely author 25.3% of the selected books, although some degree is progress is observed in the historical series, after going from 4.8% in 2011 to 37.8% in 2020. The increase in the presence of women in the juries has contributed to this phenomenon --the correlation between ratio of women in both lists being statiscally significant (rs = 0.647, p < 0.001)--, together with the commitment of supplement such as Babelia and Cultura/s to literature written by women. On the contrary, there still seem to be pockets of exclusion in El cultural and ABC cultural, which reduce the visibility of work of female writers in Spain. According to our findings, women authors stand out for their youth (they are between 8 and 20 years younger than men, depending on the indicator), cosmopolitism (there are more foreign female writers, especially American, than Spanish) and origin (mainly, Madrid and Barcelona). This article evinces the collective imaginary, settled for centuries, by which literature was considered a men's affair, and reflects on the role of cultural journalism and its prescriptive function when it comes to breaking down gender stereotype --a task that, in view of the data provided in this paper, is still far from been completed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the thematic and conceptual structure of the Spanish scientific production published in Emerging Sources Citation Index (Web of Science) journals. In this way, the aim is to identify the closest links between concepts and terms based on the co-occurrence of keywords used by the authors of the papers analysed, and also to point out the theoretical foundations that exist in the discipline through the co-citation relationships of articles in the bibliography of the documents in the sample. Finally, these results were compared with those obtained from the analysis of Spanish scientific production in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). To achieve these objectives, a network analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords and co-citation of references in articles published in Communication journals between 2015 and 2021 in ESCI (N = 3,559) and SSCI (N = 1,738) with at least one author linked to a Spanish institution was carried out. The results point to similar structural cohesion values and to a thematic and methodological similarity between both sets observed. There is a marked tendency towards quantitative studies on new technologies. While in SSCI there is an almost absolute dominance of Journalism studies, in ESCI there is a greater diversity of other disciplines such as Audiovisual Communication or Advertising. However, the intellectual structure of the production in SSCI reflects a more specialised character than in ESCI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of 2020, media around the world have started and intensified their TikTok activity to gain notoriety and reach young people, their main user group. However, as with other previously popularized social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, the platform’s logic is different from that traditionally employed by the media system when developing information products. The objective of this paper is to analyze the degree of adaptation to the logic of this network for the activity developed on it by the Spanish media. For this purpose, a combined methodology of quantitative and content analysis was applied to 446 videos posted by the official user accounts of 20 Minutos, Antena 3 Noticias, El Diario, El Mundo, and El País–the five media outlets with the largest online audience in that period–from the time the accounts were created until January 31, 2022. Specifically, we studied the activity developed, the notoriety achieved, and the interaction obtained, as well as the most common formats, topics, protagonists, and brand identity elements. The results show that the main Spanish media have tried to adapt to the entertainment logic of the platform both with the use of native editing resources as well as through the creation of original materials, predominantly soft news, about entertainment, celebrities, and lifestyle. The videos that gain more notoriety are those that are more adapted to this logic. However, the Spanish media analyzed post less frequently than international media, obtain fewer views, and register lower engagement levels; in addition, they do not use their presence on this social network to promote their other editorial products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of Communication in Spain is analyzed, contextualizing Spanish output at a global and local level between the years 2000 and 2020. Based on a descriptive bibliometric analysis of the Communication category of the Social Sciences Citation Index database, part of Web of Science, the impact of the main countries is identified. The weight of the output in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) database between 2015 and 2020 is also studied. An analysis of the output by universities in Spain for the period 2010–2020 is also carried out, comparing it with the impact and the works in the first quartile. The results reveal that Spain has been the fourth country in terms of output in Communication in the last decade and that Austria stands out as the country whose works have the greatest impact. It is also observed that 67% of Spain’s works in Communication are published in journals that are indexed in ESCI. The impact of Spanish universities is very close to the world average. The Universitat Pompeu Fabra stands out, publishing the most articles and, furthermore, being the Spanish university with most papers in the first quartile of the JCR in Communication between 2010 and 2020. The study of the Shanghai Ranking by area includes eight Spanish universities, only three of which have output in Communication that comes mainly from professors in this area. The role of the Spanish journals Comunicar and Profesional de la información is notable, as they publish a large fraction of the output by Spanish universities in the Communication field. Finally, this paper presents the challenges of research in Communication, as well as those related to its bibliometric analysis, and a reflection on the problems that affect scientific production and research in this subject area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed the results obtained for the total count between 2007 and 2018 of (1) doctoral theses defended in the 55 universities with undergraduate and/or graduate studies in communication that offer doctoral degrees, (2) competitive projects in state calls in the social sciences and humanities areas where the object of study includes a socially significant dimension of "communication" practices, and (3) papers resulting from R&D projects published in reference journals in the area of communication. These documents are the most representative of the research activity of faculty, because they constitute the published results originating from research that is recognized and legitimized by academic life, without which such documents could not have been published. Thus, the articles collected here constitute a census of publications based on previous research, since all those articles whose object of study was not previous research were not selected, e.g., essays, or epistemological reviews of authors, schools, and/or theoretical or methodological trends. Papers presented at Asociación Española de Investigación de la Comunicación (AE-IC) congresses, which are also being studied as part of the MapCom project, could also have been included; however, they are only considered tangentially herein because only a minority of them are expressly linked to research results. This overview of the productivity of communication research in Spain over a decade analyzes documents grouped by universities, Autonomous Communities, author gender, and years. A total of 4,158 documents have been analyzed. The results reflect the influence of the scientific policies of the research quality assessment agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journal Sustainability, published by MDPI, was the journal that published the most papers by researchers from Spanish institutions in 2020. This justifies a detailed examination of the Spanish scientific production in this journal. At the same time, the work of editing monographic issues in which papers with Spanish authors have been published is analyzed. For this purpose, we have identified whether each paper belongs to regular or to special issues of the journal, identifying whether the author of the paper is also editor of the monograph, or a university colleague. The nationality of the editors was also studied. The subject matter of the articles and their belonging to the area of the journal were analyzed. Most of the papers published by Spanish authors were published in special issues (81.6%), mainly edited by authors of the same nationality (63.1%). It is also found that there is an important production carried out by the same editor of the monograph, or by colleagues from the same institution. It is also found that a substantial number of works published in Sustainability (42.3%) have minimal or no relationship with the subject of sustainability. Finally, the implications of these findings are discussed under the light of the publication strategies of Spanish researchers and the science evaluation policies applied in Spain. The main controversial aspects identified have to do with the publication of papers on other subjects, the value of publishing in monographs, which in some cases could be considered as inbreeding, and the short editing times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the social structure of Spanish and Latin American communication researchers through the representation and analysis of three coauthorship networks at the national, institutional, and individual level. Such networks are built from papers indexed in the 'Communication' category by Web of Science and published between 2000 and 2019 by authors attached to a Spanish or Latin American institution (n = 5,040). The goal is to characterize the structural features of each network, identify the most central actors, and illustrate the most relevant relationships among nodes. The results show that the most central country is Spain, followed by the USA and other European nations. Among the Latin American states, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico are placed at the most relevant nodes. Latin American collaboration is preferentially addressed to the USA, especially since 2015. Regarding institutions, Spanish public universities in Madrid and Catalonia achieve the highest degrees of centrality. However, the most central Latin American institutions are private universities. The most relevant authors are Spanish researchers until 2015, when they are replaced at the top by Latin American scholars. Collaboration at both the individual and institutional levels shows a deep regional tendency, while the internationalization of researchers and universities is only more visible since 2015. This work identifies a tendency towards internal cohesion at different network levels as the number of connected nodes grows in each period. We conclude that a proper Spanish-Latin America community of communication researchers does not exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The podcast has expanded as a consumer product within the online audio ecosystem. The term has become popular, and its fame is increasing in the public sphere, whereas its definition and distinct identity, especially with respect to radio, are still being constructed. While different players, including large platforms and multimedia companies, are positioning themselves in this environment, a podcasting culture distinct from the original amateurism is also taking root. The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which and in what way the routines and practices of creation, production, and distribution have been formalized to determine whether these processes are fostering a specific professional podcasting culture in Spain. Using semistructured in-depth interviews conducted with professionals linked to the podcasting sector, we aim to determine some of the practices that these players are starting to see as well-established within and unique to the industry, as well as those practices that have yet to become established. On the one hand, thanks to the increase in business volume and investment from production and distribution companies, the space for professionalization has been consolidated. The production standards and perceived quality of this audio content have been affirmed. On the other hand, definitions and categories related to this medium's identity; the requirements with respect to understanding an audience, especially in its qualitative dimension; and the professional profiles and dynamics that must be established remain to be explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After an initial period characterized by experimentation, amateurism, small audiences, technological difficulties, and scarce funding, podcasting is now fully consolidated. The aim of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of the Spanish podcast sphere: its structural, personal, thematic, formal, economic, and dissemination aspects. To this end, a content analysis of 21 variables was applied to the 206 programs that attained the highest popularity in the general rankings of Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and iVoox during the first quarter of 2021. Along the structural dimension, the results reveal the preponderance of digital-native podcasts in comparison with previously broadcast podcasts, and of podcasts promoted by radio stations or those associated with networks over independent ones. Regarding the personnel involved, programs produced by professionals from the media or other cultural industries are more popular than those produced by amateurs, while those presented by men are more popular than those presented by women. Regarding their themes, content related to mystery and/or crime, history, entertainment, and emotional well-being predominates. In the formal sphere, the majority of programs are exclusively audio programs, produced weekly and in Spanish, with a limited presence of the other co-official languages in Spain. In terms of funding, the most common situation is production by media groups or podcast networks, followed by monetization on YouTube and offering additional services. Based on all this, the main conclusion of this study is that podcasting in Spain has abandoned the democratizing potential attributed to it by some theorists and researchers in its beginnings to become embedded in a largely commercial logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer hospitals manage social media platforms in a professional way to improve their relationships with internal and external stakeholders and reinforce their corporate brand. To do so, they need their health professionals to be involved: these professionals become brand ambassadors able to influence society. Nevertheless, they face different challenges: legal issues, new patients' demands, privacy-related matters, or the difficulty of disseminating scientific content. This literature review paper analyzes how cancer hospitals manage their social media platforms to improve their reputation. To do this, we carry out a systematic literature review focused on papers published in the USA and Spain, based on the Salsa framework proposed by Grant and Booth (2009). We then define an online corporate communication model allowing cancer hospitals to improve their reputation through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (MedPac Model for Building Cancer Hospital Brands). The paper concludes that this model is useful for cancer hospitals because it prioritizes persons (brand ambassadors) rather than companies, focuses on scientific and emotional content rather than business information, and is based on human values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a research study whose objective was to identify the facilitating factors and barriers that, in the opinion of representatives of the Spanish scientific community, impact the implementation of the new open science model in four areas: open access, open research data, research assessment and open peer review. A qualitative study was designed in which information was obtained through interviews with researchers, editors of scientific journals, representatives of assessment agencies and vice-chancellors, and through a focus group of librarians with expertise in aspects of open science. The enabling factors and barriers identified were related to the researcher and the fruit of their research, as well as to the scientific ecosystem, which provides direct institutional support and backing (universities/research centres), the regulatory framework (management of the science system) and the science communication system (media). The results indicate that a shift in scientific practices toward the open science model can only be achieved if there is a policy framework that integrates all initiatives and links into the scientific assessment and reward system, and if the necessary funding is in place to support this transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the context of disinformation in Spain from the perspective of the pseudo-media (i.e., websites that mimic conventional media to offer partisan content based on alternative facts). Using a quantitative (N = 1,143) and qualitative (n = 396) methodology, this research analyses publications from eight Spanish pseudo-media that reach more than 4 million unique users. Results reveal an interest in three topics: vaccination, restrictions and speculation about Covid-19, national politics--focused on criticism against government--and topics related to human rights--mainly LGBTI, gender, immigration--with a total of 58.1% of the content published in four sections (International, Spain, Society, and Economy). The study reveals a growing trend towards polarisation and the use of clickbait techniques in four out of ten headlines. The Internet and social media are the most common sources quoted, while a third of the items lack sources or correspond to opinion pieces. Minorities and vulnerable groups are framed as a social threat, and the presentation of the coalition government as a danger to Spain that must be put to an end, which makes the discourse of these websites in tune with the ideology of the far right wing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to public information (that generated by public institutions) is a right recognized by both European (Unión Europea, 2001) and Spanish legislation (España, 1992; 1997; 2013). The bodies of the Spanish State must to make available to the citizens, free of charge and in a transparent way, all the documents that they generate, unless there are national security reasons. Many national, regional and local governments have created information systems or public information platforms in the form of newsletters or gazettes. The purpose of this paper is to find out how is, on a documentary level, the main informative gazette of Spain, the Boletín oficial del Estado (BOE). The metadata of the published documents are studied and the metadata used for documentary description are analyzed in a deeper way. The results reflect the absence of documentary descriptors in more than 89% of the total documentary BOE' corpus. In recent years this figure has barely exceeded 50%. The paper ends with a few recommendations for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public administrations publish open data for later reuse by citizens. Besides the obvious impact on transparency, they have an important economic potential which explains the increasing adoption of this type of initiatives. There is an increasing number of administrations that decide to create open data portals, a tendency that municipalities have followed. Few empirical papers have assessed this type of portals and the analyses have been mainly qualitative or limited to a reduced number of portals, so there are no generally accepted criteria for the assessment of their implementation. The main contribution of this paper is the definition of a method to analyse open data portals and its application to a sample of municipalities of Spain, a country at the forefront of data re-utilization in Europe. Furthermore, the economic- financial information available in these portals is analysed, as it is essential to accountability, fight corruption and evaluate the financial sustainability and effectiveness of public service delivery. Results show that there is much room for improvement in this field. Only 40% of the cities analysed have an open data portal, and the average score of the sample analysed does not reach 50%. Most portals seem to work as mere data repositories, neglecting those aspects that promote data use by the non-expert public, accountability, citizen engagement and the quality of the data being disclosed (e.g., definition of the metadata used). So, the paper concludes with some recommendations for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their formal proposal in 2010, various studies have been carried out on altmetrics from different perspectives and at different levels. However, the problem of the country-specific differences found in such studies has not been addressed in depth and considering the wide range of social media sources. This paper presents a cross-country comparison of altmetric coverage between Spain and a selection of 16 countries (EU-15 and the United States) in 22 research fields. All Spanish publications indexed in Web of Science that were published between 2016 and 2020, as well as all mentions of their altmetrics collected on Altmetric.com, were retrieved. The results show that, of the 434,827 Spanish publications considered, 55% are found on Altmetric.com. General altmetric coverage in Spain is similar to that in the rest of Europe and the United States, but it is in areas such as Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences where the lowest levels of coverage are found, although in the case of the latter the publications receive a higher number of mentions. Spanish publications reach a total of 3,569,553 mentions from different social media platforms, but Twitter is the main source of these mentions, accounting for 89%. Differences between research fields are also found, such as Environment & Ecology receiving a higher number of policy mentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the use of Twitter by the candidates for the presidency of the Government of Spain of the five main parties at the national level -PSOE, PP, Vox, Podemos and Ciudadanos- of the general elections campaigns held in April and November 2019. The main purpose of our study is to determine the strategies used of the microblogging network by the leaders, both in terms of activity, interaction and notoriety and in terms of topics and discursive development, as well as their similarities and differences. The secondary objective is to study the evolution of these strategies both between the two campaigns and with respect to previous elections. To this end, the research is based on a content analysis methodology that studies quantitative, qualitative and discursive elements. The results reveal an uneven use of Twitter in terms of the frequency of updates, but similar in terms of its unidirectionality, with scarce interaction with other users and a predominance of tweets with their own content over retweets. The dissemination of other people's content was used almost entirely to promote the candidate's political party and, to a lesser extent, to interact with journalists. Dialogue with citizens was almost always residual, both in retweets and in responses. This utilitarian conception of the microblogging network was accompanied by a polarizing thematic selection, with an almost general preponderance of political issues over policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological transformations and, especially, the accelerated process of digitalization have changed the profiles and production routines of the media. At the same time, universities have had to adapt their journalism curricula to new training needs. This paper analyzes the evolution of the technical-digital training of the journalism degree in Spain over the last two decades through a comparative study of three stages: before, during, and after the adaptation to the EHEA (2000-2010-2020). The research brings together, as valuable reference material, the curricular offerings of 112 programs and 242 subjects that show the educational evolution of the digital environment over the last 20 years, with a longitudinal and epistemological approach. The trends identified by this diagnostic work confirm, among other aspects, how the design of journalism curricula has evolved at a slow and asynchronous pace in digital training until the last decade and with disparate speeds between universities. Added to this is the conformation of a highly varied epistemological heritage that, beyond the specific names of the subjects, denotes a progressive commitment to digital and multimedia teaching, combining generic hybrid knowledge with more specialized training in terms of languages and formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication studies in Spain have now become consolidated based on their evolution over the last 50 years. The aim of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of the current state of Spanish higher education in Communication. To this end, an analysis is carried out of the structure and composition of the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees (master and PhD studies) in Communication at public and private universities in Spain, paying special attention to the centers that host these studies, the people who contribute to their operation, and their offerings and distribution. Using a descriptive methodology and the content analysis technique, an analysis form is applied to the universities composing the system of Communication studies in Spain, based on their offerings and the information available and accessible on their institutional websites. The results reveal the difficulty of accessing such data and the lack of common criteria (or compliance) for presenting such information on official websites. The results reveal a greater offering at the national level but a wide dispersion of the higher education offering in terms of type, location, type of university, and territorial distribution. We also highlight the gender gap in terms of faculty leadership as well as among teaching staff. We emphasize the phenomenon of double or combined degrees, especially at private universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TikTok, already widely used before the pandemic, boomed during the quarantine that locked down large parts of the world, reaching 2 billion downloads and 800 million monthly active users worldwide by the end of 2020. Of these 800 million users, 41% are aged between 16 and 24 years. This social network, widely known for its entertainment videos, is increasingly becoming a place for political discussion and therefore a unique opportunity for political actors to (re) connect with young people. Acknowledging that the political uses of TikTok are still understudied, this paper aims to explore whether and how Spanish political parties are including TikTok as part of their communication strategy. Through an affordance-centered content analysis of all the posts published by the five most important Spanish political parties (PP, PSOE, Ciudadanos, Podemos, and Vox), the current results show that, although all Spanish political parties have adopted this platform, their usage is unequal. From a quantitative perspective, PP was the first party to open a TikTok account, but its usage has been discontinuous; Podemos and Ciudadanos are the parties that publish the most and most constantly, while Vox has only published nine posts and the PSOE one. Nonetheless, from a qualitative perspective, Podemos and Vox generate more engagement and seem to understand and exploit TikTok's specific affordances better. The findings allow it to be concluded that, although globally Spanish political parties do not fully exploit the platform's affordances and tend to use it as a unilateral tool for promotion, the most engaging posts are those favoring interaction and geared toward politainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High technology has been one of the main assets used by the media around the world to stand out from the masses and reach an increasingly fragmented audience, including drone journalism, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. In this regard, the mid-2010s saw a whole phase of experimentation that began with so-called immersive journalism, a new way of producing news content using virtual reality and 360° video, which introduced various novelties in the way stories are both told and consumed/watched. Among these, 360° real-image videos are the most common form, which can be partly explained by factors such as time and cost, although it is also possible to find completely computer-generated (CG) nonfiction experiences. Legacy media such as The New York Times, El País, or the BBC have been experimenting with the possibilities of this immersive storytelling, but what about digital native media? The aim of this paper is to explore the use of 360° video by Spanish digital native media in order to observe the degree of development of immersive storytelling, as well as the quality of the pieces available more than 5 years after the start of this phenomenon known as immersive journalism. For this purpose, a content analysis of 360° videos published during the period 2015-2019 by El español, eldiario.es, El independiente, and El HuffPost has been carried out. The study of these particular cases reveals the absence of a narrative strategy aligned with the immersive format; in general, these are simple videos that provide little added value compared with the conventional format. Furthermore, the results show that the history of immersive journalism by these cybermedia has been limited in terms of both volume and time, with little guarantee that it will continue into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the current panorama of science evaluation, the limitations of citation indexes to study the social sciences and humanities have been the subject of wide debate. To resolve this situation, different products have been created for use in national contexts, since they cover certain aspects not contained in more international indices. An example is the In-RECS family, where an indicator such as the impact factor of Eugene Garfield is defined, but its contribution lies in the ability to evaluate research in Spain by obtaining citation indicators. This paper thus highlights the need to create new products for research evaluation in general, but particularly in the social sciences and humanities. The context in which different alternatives arise and are developed to evaluate existing journals is presented, along with Dialnet Metrics, a citation index developed by the Dialnet Foundation in collaboration with the EC3 Group and dozens of Spanish universities. Based on an analysis of the citations of source journals from different subject areas, Dialnet Metrics provides indicators to evaluate the research impact at different levels. This bibliometric product enables contextualized analysis at the micro (researchers), meso (journals), and macro (areas and universities) levels. Finally, the content, data volumes, and structure of this citation index are described quantitatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journalism being taught at universities in Spain is undergoing intensive changes as a result of the dual pressure exerted by the impact of digitisation in two specific aspects. The first is the journalistic system itself (business models, professional routines, information consumption, etc.). The second aspect involves the teaching guidelines established as a result of the implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Focusing on the latter issue, the current debate regarding the orientation of journalistic education is calling for this aspect not to be relegated or limited to training in technical skills, which are constantly being renewed by technological developments of the digital environment. On the contrary, journalism education must also take into account other skills that foster the achievement of critical thinking, which is fundamental for the exercise of the journalistic profession. However, in the face of an increasingly digitised, competitive labour market, journalism studies and their training programmes also have a duty to provide the skills and competencies demanded by this market. In this paper, we have conducted a systematic review of some of the experiences of innovative teaching that have been successfully carried out in Journalism degrees taught in Spain for this purpose (service-learning, project-based learning, content curation, and edublogs, among others). These experiences reflect the involvement of university professors in providing comprehensive education for future journalists, with a strong emphasis on the intensive use of the digital resources currently available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines databases of female experts as tools to promote gender parity in the sources consulted and cited by journalists. To do this, we conducted a search of databases available online (n = 88) and carried out in-depth interviews with people in charge of these databases (n = 4) as well as a survey among female scientific researchers included in the database of the Association of Women Researchers and Technologists of Spain (AMIT) (n = 919). The main results reflect the great potential of these tools but indicate that, to be effective, they require fluid communication with the media and a design that allows their incorporation into the regular routines of journalists. In Spain, their impact is still low and, as in the rest of the world, there is great fragmentation of resources accompanied by very weak interaction among the different initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study was to provide the global community of interested scholars with an updated understanding of digital humanities in Spain, in terms of researchers and research centres, disciplines involved and research topics of interest, trends in digital resources development, main funding bodies and the evolution of their investment since the early nineties. One of the characteristics that differentiates this study from previous approaches is the information used to carry out the research. It combines large datasets of publicly available data from trusted sources with a handpicked selection of records grouping information scattered over the Web. Most of the evidence detected by other studies has been numerically confirmed. At the same time, the new metrics and values established constitute a reference base for monitoring the future evolution of the discipline, and thus favour comparisons. Half of the researchers were found to be affiliated to only nine institutions, whereas the other half of them were scattered across 84 locations. Department affi- liation showed a varied pattern of the different degrees of specialization in each institution. Although the major historic role played by Philology was confirmed, the rising interest of other areas of the Humanities and Social Science produces a wider picture, which helped to identify five large clusters of research topics, centred on major disciplines. The quan- titative analysis of funding, a dimension almost unexplored in the Humanities, proved to be a valuable way to assess the discipline and its historical evolution. In fact, it revealed interesting trends that led to our proposal of a three-phase periodization in the consolidation of digital humanities in Spain. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations regarding how to deal with issues that could harm the future development of this research area and the role that Spanish researchers can play in the international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of think tanks in Spain has been growing in the last few years with an equally increasing number of social and grassroots movements. This article offers content analysis results from a selection of eight Spanish think tanks in the digital press during a seven-year period, adding new conclusions to previous literature for the same period. Not only does this research explore the appearance on the media, but also the type of mentions and authorship of the articles and blogs included in the digital press, contributing to a deeper study of think tanks. The objective of this study is to analyse the limited presence of Spanish think tanks in media outlets and whether their appearance is ideologically motivated. The article built a constructed week sampling and followed a content analysis methodology to gather quantitative and qualitative elements from the selected sampling (n=1,101). The paper concludes that the presence of think tanks in the Spanish digital press is limited, causing not only a lack of knowledge of their existence but also raising questions about how they try to impact on the policymaking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the information coverage by the Spanish newspapers El país, El mundo, ABC, and La vanguardia in Twitter on the electoral campaign prior to the 10 November 2019 general elections. A content analysis of all tweets published by these media regarding the elections (n = 1,462) between Friday 1 and Saturday 9 November reveals that, although there are differences in the production patterns and features of the messages, the subject received notable attention in all the newspapers. The coverage gravitated around two main themes: the 4N electoral debate, and campaign events. The results reveal that, although most of the tweets had a neutral tone, messages with clear positioning corresponding to the editorial line of the newspaper were also published, albeit to a lesser extent. During the electoral period, the media agenda revolved around this issue, accounting for around one-fifth of all pieces published on Twitter. Newspapers do not take advantage of the dialogic nature or possibilities offered by this social network to create a community among their readers, limiting themselves to the dissemination of content from their digital edition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies, one qualitative and the other quantitative, have been carried out, each using two samples differentiated by the degree of knowledge of the performance of media: informed population and communication professionals. A quantitative analysis of the reputation of the Spanish media is carried out, based on a qualitative analysis of the professional and business reality of the media with the best reputation. It is concluded that there is a broad consensus that there is no confidence in the media because the information that they disseminate is manipulated. The credibility of a medium shows a high correlation with its history, consistent with the theory of reputation, because consolidation of a stable reputation requires time. The reputation of each type of media (paper press, digital press, radio, and television) is evaluated, yielding two rankings of the 16 media with the best reputation in Spain, corresponding to the two samples analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doctoral dissertations enable the transfer of research skills and capacities to future generations and the consolidation of lines of research in a given area of knowledge. The field of Library and Information Science in public universities in Spain is characterized by the supervision of doctoral theses by academics in the area. We identified active professors during the 2019-2020 academic year, their date of appointment as civil servants within the public university system, the dissertations that they supervised, and their participation in papers published in scientific journals. The analysis included 644 theses. About a quarter (23%) of university faculty have never supervised a doctoral thesis, and most faculty members and tenured professors (60%) show a lower than average rate of adviserships per year since their academic appointment. There is a high concentration of PhD advisers in just a few institutions and academics (8% of university professors have supervised 42% of the dissertations), with an important gender imbalance: women supervised an average of 1.8 dissertations, compared with 2.6 for men. Information units and services, study metrics and scientific publications, and information sources are the topics of 47% of the dissertations. Many of the professors with 10 or more adviserships (n/N = 12/18) lack a subject area specialization, and their role in PhD supervision was not related to their participation in research activities oriented toward publishing in scientific journals. Our results suggest that considering supervision of doctoral theses as an important academic merit could contribute to a further concentration of power and social capital among a small group of advisers. This phenomenon could reduce the plurality of topics addressed and favor suboptimal adviserships. The imbalances described emerge as another threat, exacerbating the epistemological crisis in the discipline and in the university studies in this area of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the current paradigm of the publication culture in Spain, examining the negative and positive forces that shape the dominant dynamics in the production, dissemination and evaluation of scholars' works. Following the intentional sampling of maximum variety, we planned a set of interviews with scholars in the area of communication that represented the heterogeneity of academic ranks, gender, and territories of Spain. The final output consisted of thirty-five semi-structured interviews that took place between May 2018 and May 2019. Scholarship on how researchers and university professors experience publication cultures is abundant, however the national and international studies that address this phenomenon from a holistic approach are practically non-existent. Comprising three actions or systems -production, dissemination and evaluation-, the current publishing culture is depicted as a structure tuned to a set of global-accepted requirements that seem easy to understand and replicate. Under such model, most of the scholars experience discomfort because overproduction is widespread, social transference is rare, and the production and diffusion of scientific works frequently occur at the expense of scholars themselves. The goal seems to be inspired by the cost- and time-effective system of evaluation processes that, despite academics' general opposition, official bodies and university departments have adopted to circumvent the costly task of assessing scientists' outcomes on an individual basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific research in the communication field has experienced great growth in recent years. Recent technological changes, as well as the emergence of Web 2.0 and 3.0 and new forms of communication, such as social networks, have led to new and varied studies in the discipline. This paper analyzes the scientific production of the 27 countries with the greatest scientific production in the communication field in the period from 2003 to 2018. The results indicate that: the most productive countries are the USA, UK, and Spain; there is less international collaboration than in other disciplines, but there is a network of European collaboration that is quite dense and has great impact, and another network in Pacific countries (Asia + Oceania), albeit with lower density and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish university libraries have had to adapt their services to the virtual environment after the classroom-based teaching lockdown in March 2020 due to Covid-19. Given the possibility of a greater virtual dimension of learning and teaching during the next academic year, these library services should be improved. This paper analyzes how university libraries are strengthening their support for online learning and are progressively being integrated into the virtual campus, as well as the actions that are necessary to enhance these services and the main difficulties perceived by their librarians. For this purpose, a sample of professionals from university libraries was interviewed, and the research literature on this subject was also reviewed to identify the main international experiences that can be considered as benchmarks for improving virtual library services. Both the research literature and the librarians interviewed agree on two aspects: the need to increase collaboration with other university departments and the wide scope for improvement in the integration of the library into online learning, which is currently limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Health Organization (2011) has emphasized communication as one of the biggest challenges and places risk communication among the essential competencies required to tackle a pandemic. In light of the Covid-19 crisis, the aim of this paper is to assess how information forms and sources influence the public's information-seeking behaviors, and the perception of government's crisis response strategies during the pandemic. An online survey was conducted between March 14 and April 14, 2020, the first four weeks after the declaration of the State of Alarm in Spain. The online questionnaire included questions regarding information-seeking behavior, trust in different sources and channels, perception of government communication management, message retention, and demographic questions. Findings show a synchronous use of multiple media and platforms in line with channel complementarity theory. Three of the four most used information channels are considered mainstream news media. However, the second source of information is WhatsApp. People who relied more on the mainstream news media for Covid-19 information are generally most likely to express positive opinions of the government's communication strategy. Findings also show that people less able to make correct attributions of governmental information were the most critical of the government's crisis response. Finally, trust in public authorities' decreases as the crisis evolves as a general matter. It is specially truth for the WHO, but there is also a striking exemption for local governments. Implications for theory and empirical research and recommendations and new issues to address are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To know the perceived and real difficulties of the company in Spain in relation to the implementation of R+D+i by the Spanish business, we start from the vision that employees have about the ease or difficulty of their companies at the time of doing research and development and therefore, innovation. In this paper we analyze the highlights of the survey prepared under the auspices of the "Scientific Culture Research Project: perception and attitudes towards science and innovation in the Spanish business sector" funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The results obtained advance that education and the promotion of an innovative attitude are the basis for achieving a successful business development since innovation is one of the key pillars of the maintenance and survival of companies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to establish which document types are considered essential for learning at universities and, therefore, are recommended to students. Additionally, an analysis was conducted to determine if electronic resources are a part of the recommended reading lists for the various subjects across the curriculum and what exactly their weight is in relation to other document types. The current syllabi for the 2014-2015 academic year were accessed for each subject in ten majors offered at three Spanish universities: University Carlos III of Madrid, University of León, and University of Salamanca. The primary finding is the lack of homogeneity in the number of references by university and major which is due to the disparity observed as far as the number of references per subject. Books are the resources most frequently suggested in all of the curricula analyzed. The scarce use in course syllabi of journal articles and, particularly, conference papers, is significant. Links to institutional websites predominate, whereas the presence of electronic books is residual despite a proven inclination to prioritize recommendations for monographs and textbooks. The presence of electronic journals and electronic articles is also marginal. It is evident that traditional document types continue to be recommended despite the increase of electronic documents in academic libraries' collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overview of a study carried out in Spain--under the auspices of the subscription agency Swets Information Services--on the introduction and use of e-journals, databases and other digital information resources. The results show a high level of acceptance of electronic media, even though paper continues to have strong supporters due mainly to the possibilities of long-term conservation and ease of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the products of Thomson-Reuters is the list of highly cited researchers, which became more important when it was incorporated into the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities. Scores on the Shanghai Ranking HiCi indicator are related to the number of highly cited researchers (HCR) by university. In the 2013 edition, methodological changes have been made in listing highly cited authors. The main aim of this paper is to analyze these changes and the new HCR distribution by country. The paper also lists the new HCR from Spain. At the national level, Spain increased its global representation to 2.52% and at the institutional level 23 universities are scored on the HiCi indicator, helping to configure a new map of research excellence. The paper concludes with a preliminary assessment of the impact of the new lists on the position of Spain's universities in the Shanghai ranking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the weaknesses of the Humanities and Social Sciences journal publishing sector in Spain. A high percentage of these journals are published by universities and often as a result of the effort of a small team (e.g., professional association, department, research group). They often have very low numbers of papers published per year, limited impact, and inefficient management, and may find it difficult to overcome a certain image of inbreeding. Against this dominant model, the authors propose the merger, co-publishing or restructuring of current journals to improve their management and achieve greater national and international recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practices for free digital content downloads in the publishing industry are referred to as a problem by cultural and business leaders worldwide. The creation of systems to protect the files, the emergence of national and international agencies to monitor illegal downloads, and the publishing industry's reluctance to abandon the paper and embrace the digital formats, provide the context for a practice that is little studied when it comes to books. The aim of this paper is to analyze the conditions under which it occurs in Spain, examining the legal provision of content, and the availability of works in p2p networks and blogs. The hypothesis is that in the book arena, the content downloads do not have the relevance and scale they possess in music or film, and that in large part they are motivated by the lack of a legal offering that is varied and up-to-date, and by deficiencies in the sales and distribution platforms. The presence of the bestselling books in major sales platforms and in different file sharing networks is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-archiving was studied in 3,495 papers in 109 core journals that published 50% of Valencia's scientific production in biomedical and health sciences included in the 2000-2004 ISI databases. The effectiveness of self-archiving is analyzed with respect to the feasibility of launching open access institutional and subject-specific repositories. Data were obtained from the Sherpa/Romeo database. Self-archiving is favourable for the implementation of institutional repositories because 56.8% of papers could be immediately deposited, a percentage that increases to 72% after a period of embargo and to 87% when papers published in full text journals are included. The feasibility of establishing biomedical and health science repositories for the Valencian Community is questionable, due to the fact that most publishers will not grant permission for inclusion in a repository unless mandated by the research funding agency, a practice lacking in our country at present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main features of 207 Spanish health sciences journals active in 2014, and their visibility in six biomedical and multidisciplinary databases are described. Of these databases, Scopus and Ibecs provide the best coverage of these journals, and Medline and WoS the worst. The discipline best represented is medicine, followed by psychology, nursing and pharmacy. Among the observed characteristics, there were an absence of journals published exclusively on paper and the presence of journals published in English or bilingual Spanish-English and with open access. The article includes the journal list, which can be a reference tool for researchers selecting target journals for publication, for publishers in the health sciences areas and for information scientists for use in their database management tasks or in advising other professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific social networks are a new meeting place for researchers and a major instrument for the promotion of knowledge. Their use is increasing in the scientific community, as they are practical tools to disseminate research results and to share knowledge. This paper examines the presence of 77 Spanish universities in the two main scientific social networks (ResearchGate and Academia.edu). The results show that, despite the continuous development that those networks are having worldwide, the number of Spanish members in them is considered insufficient and in some universities is almost anecdotal. These results should be the starting point for an action program of the universities to increase the membership of their academic staff in those networks, as part of their mission of disseminating knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a quantitative approach, this paper presents some of the preliminary results of a research project focused on the analysis of the motivations that encourage citizens to actively participate in online news media, using the mechanisms provided by their websites, and through open social network platforms. The findings show that, although there is a widespread discourse of distrust in connection to journalists and the traditional media institutions, as well as general criticism of the actual practices of journalists, the common understanding of the participatory dimension of the media does not entail discourses of change or modification of the existing hegemony. Instead of turning to alternative sources, such as citizen journalism or non-traditional media, or taking the lead by creating their own content, citizens prefer to continue to respect journalism as a profession and the traditional media institutions as the main producers of news as well as the most trusted sources of information. Furthermore, although in previous studies audience participation "in" the media has been highlighted, the findings of this research show that the practice of user recommendation or dissemination of media content through social networks has been adopted by a large number of citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile devices today have become the center of our connectivity. Radio companies tailor their content in several ways: podcasting, streaming, and mobile applications. The aim of this paper is to learn more about the mobile app content of the most popular talk radio stations in Spain. For this purpose, in January 2015 we conducted a qualitative content analysis in order to establish the type of products provided, their structure and hierarchy, and to determine to what extent Spanish talk radio stations are taking full advantage of this new potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse which production values are more determinant regarding the audience's quality perception with respect to different types of entertainment television genres. In order to develop this study, we have taken into account production values such as the creative and technical quality, the host, the set and the content. The main source of data for this empirical study is an original survey. The target population consisted of the Spanish population and the sample was designed to be representative. The results show that in spite of the emergence of the connected TV -resulting from the convergence of television and the internet-, which is profoundly changing the audiovisual market, the cornerstone of their business remains the same: content quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish research in Documentation (or Library and Information Science, LIS) began to stand out in the 1980s, in parallel with the creation of university studies in Library and Information Science, and it increased its activity significantly until the year 2000. In this period, research in Documentation was oriented to disseminate rather than innovate, and also had a low international impact, shortage of economic and human resources, and poor methodological quality. In the first 20 years of the 21st century, we have witnessed an outstanding growth and diversification of this research activity, which has led to the overcoming of most of the problems mentioned before. The objective of the text is to present a general overview of the development of Documentation research in Spain in the last 20 years based on the analysis of five fundamental aspects: publications (articles and monographs), topics and methodologies, scientific journals, research projects and doctoral theses. General descriptive data from public statistical sources and comments from a bibliographic review are provided for each of them. As a conclusion, a very positive global balance of Spanish research in Documentation in the last 20 years stands out, not only a quantitative increase (in publications, theses, research projects, etc.) but also a qualitative improvement in the use of research methods and techniques, as well as a diversification of the research topics. In any case, internationalization (collaboration with foreign authors) and the presentation of international projects could be improved. Finally, there is a risk in near future related to aging and the absence of generational renewal of the research staff that can will slow down this growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]