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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. Resumen Se aborda la estructura social de la comunidad española y latinoamericana de investigadores en Comunicación. Para ello se representan y analizan las redes de coautorías en tres niveles: naciones, instituciones y autores. Estas redes se construyen a partir de los artículos de revistas indexadas en la Web of Science categorizadas dentro del área “Communication” y publicados entre 2000 y 2019 por autores con afiliación a un centro español o latinoamericano (n = 5.040). Se busca así caracterizar estructuralmente cada red, identificar los actores más centrales y delimitar las relaciones más relevantes entre los nodos y medir la cohesión de la red, así como trazar la evolución de las coautorías en el período analizado. Los resultados muestran que el país más central es España, seguido por Estados Unidos y otras naciones europeas. Entre los estados latinoamericanos, Brasil, Chile y México ocupan los lugares más relevantes. La colaboración de Latinoamérica se dirige preferentemente hacia Estados Unidos, especialmente a partir de 2015. En cuanto a las instituciones, las universidades públicas madrileñas y catalanas destacan por su centralidad. Por el contrario, las universidades latinoamericanas más centrales son centros privados. Respecto a los autores, los más centrales son especialmente investigadores españoles, pero a partir de 2015 son reemplazados en los puestos más relevantes por autores latinoamericanos. No obstante, la colaboración, tanto institucional como individual, es marcadamente regional. La internacionalización de individuos e instituciones sólo se hace más visible a partir de 2015. Se identifica una tendencia a la cohesión interna de las redes en sus distintos niveles en tanto que aumenta el número de nodos conectados entre sí. Se concluye que no existe una comunidad propiamente hispano-latinoamericana de investigación en Comunicación.

In Scopus there are four times more documents in first-quartile publications than in fourth-quartile ones. Publishers intend to adjust the editorial supply to the demand from authors, which seems to focus primarily on Q1 publications. Since 44% of the papers are concentrated in Q1 journals, papers published in journals in this quartile will be more likely to exceed the global average of impact. To the extent that publications are in greater demand by authors, they tend to be absorbed in different ways by large publishing groups. It has not been the growth of the editorial offer that has caused this over-demand from authors, but rather the identification of part of the editorial offering by public regulators as reliable in the research evaluation processes, resulting in a concentration of demand for Q1 journals by researchers.

Scholarly monographs provide a good example to show the evolution of the impact that digital publishing has had over the last few decades in the transmission and communication of scientific information. On the one hand, in the area of Social Sciences and Humanities relevance in quantitative terms has been undermined, giving prominence to other document types such as research papers published in academic journals. Moreover, their visibility and accessibility have been conditioned by a number of factors that form an intrinsic part of the digital medium itself. Based on these two fundamental premises, this paper aims to analyze only the situation of scholarly monographs in institutional systems for research assessment and tenure, from the perspective of the various proposed requirements regarding accreditation for the different figures of university teaching staff and the request for Spanish recognition of six-year research periods.

The scientific literature on altmetrics published from 2005 to 2018 was analysed. The overall structure of the speciality’s intellectual landscape is depicted through clusters of co-cited references, analysing journal and author co-citations. The 56,936 references cited in the 8,145 papers of all kinds retrieved from the Dimensions bibliographic database were included in the initial dataset used in the analysis. Pathfinder networks were generated with CiteSpace to determine the most prevalent journals and authors in the speciality. Conceptual structures were identified by co-citation clustering and latent semantic analysis. ‘Open knowledge’, ‘altmetric collection’, ‘web indicator’, ‘assessing research’, ‘Research- Gate score’, ‘open data citation advantage’, ‘Google Scholar author citation’, ‘share data’, ‘academic tweet’, ‘Mendeley' readership count’ and ‘social media metrics’ were observed to be the lines of research presently favoured by specialists. Statistical indicators were calculated to determine the journals and contributors making the greatest impact.