Communication Studies, Interdisciplinarity Debates, and the Quest for Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on interdisciplinarity as a “future field” and what it means for the communication discipline. It argues that, whereas interdisciplinarity has the potential to produce “high-risk, high-reward” research outcomes, communication studies has more to gain refining the vast body of knowledge that has shaped its conceptual and institutional particularities across time and space. Whereas this argument is not anything new, I contribute to these debates by emphasizing anthropological questioning, epistemological formulations, ethical reasoning, and the quest for meaning as potential modalities of consolidating the epistemic and political views that have guided the intellectual impetus of communication studies. The proposed refinement is predicated on the assumption that communication studies is already a boundary-crossing discipline; the very reason it arguably lacks coherent historical roots and scientific rationality. The article contributes to the debates on how to operationalize communication studies as a scientific domain without losing its unique boundary-crossing appeal.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.088 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.185 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.036 | 0.041 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".