Journal review: Discourse & Communication
This article is part of a series that is progressively reviewing journals for their KM content.
| Official Journal Synopsis | Discourse & Communication (DCM) is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles that pay specific attention to the qualitative, discourse analytical approach to issues in communication research.
Discourse & Communication publishes substantial research articles, discussion notes as well as reviews and review articles by women and men from many countries. Its diversity is apparent in the variety of its theories, methods and approaches, thus avoiding the frequent limitation to one school, approach or academic sect. |
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| Publisher | SAGE Publishing | ||||
| Significant Figures | Editor Teun A van Dijk | ||||
| Indexes | Google Scholar Issue Index CrossRef |
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| Issues | 60 | Ongoing? | Yes | Open Access | Green Open Access |
Discourse & Communication (DCM) publishes articles with a heavy focus on textual and linguistic analysis. Articles tend to be very dense academically, often heavy in jargon, statistics and mathematics, making them less accessible than some other interdisciplinary journals.
However, the high level of rigour displayed makes them excellent resources for providing specific evidence that supports situational analysis and hypothesis generation in a knowledge management context. For example, an excellent 2012 analysis of the textual characteristics of strategic plans found 16 prototypical headings for content and concludes that:
[Strategic Plans] provide a base on which to understand the organization, and offer guidelines to assess the accomplishment of strategic objectives [while including] self-referential sections clearly aimed at further legitimating the use of such guidelines … [The] ‘strategic planning process’ often refers to participative processes and stages of approval, assuring readers that not only does the plan represent careful delineation of future actions, but that this has been developed through appropriately democratic procedures, representing consensus and commitment. The need to generate commitment … seems further reflected in the language itself through the distinctive emphasis that is placed on the triple features of optimism, commonality and achievement.
Discourse & Communication is operated by SAGE Publishing under a Green Open Access model. This means that articles are not made available by SAGE for free, but authors are allowed to make their own versions of a manuscript freely available to others and/or published in their own institutional repository. Although there are some significant gaps, this self-publishing option has achieved approximately 60% of articles being freely available for download through a search on Google Scholar.
