Beyond the discipline, beyond the institution: The outward reach of French Information and Communication Sciences (SIC) through the prism of editorial collaborations (2012–2018)

Abstract

The internal interdisciplinarity of Information and Communication Sciences (Sciences de l’information et de la communication, SIC) in France has often been discussed in an effort to apprehend how various academic inputs and scholarly traditions have integrated to form SIC. However, the external interdisciplinarity of SIC, or cross-disciplinarity, i.e., its connections and collaborations with other disciplines, has received comparatively less attention. The present contribution seeks to address this gap through the prism of editorial collaborations. Our dataset consists of a list of collective publications covering the period 2012–2018, published in 2019 (Dynamiques des recherches en sciences de l’information et de la communication) under the coordination of the Permanent Conference of Directors of Research Units in Information and Communication Sciences (CPDirSIC). In this dataset, narrow interdisciplinarity is observed within France. Outside France, joint editorial endeavors mostly bring together researchers who are already located in the field of information-communication. The study also suggests the significance of linguistic proximity, with the majority of international collaborations concerning countries with French-speaking areas. Finally, the thematic area within SIC also plays a role in the way interdisciplinarity materializes. Given the limitations of the dataset, however, these findings should be interpreted with caution and must not be generalized or extrapolated beyond the specific scope of this study.