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Scientific journals are currently the main instrument of dissemination with which the scientific community transmits their researches, being the field of communication one of those that has experienced the greatest growth in this type of publications. Given the proliferation of researches in this field, bibliometric studies such us this one are necessary, which pursues as primary objectives: the currently knowledge of scientific activity in the field of communication and the analysis of the sources referenced in scientific articles; this will allow to discover the main theories and authors that support these articles in the main journals in the field of communication research. Content analysis has been used as a method, whose variables have allowed us to know the gender of the authors, their origin, the topic of the articles, the type of research, the methodologies of the texts and analyse the type of sources they use in their investigations. The 148 articles that make up the first issues published in 2016 and 2017, belonging to the first ten communication journals indexed in the Journal of Citation Reports (JCR), of Web of Science, have been analysed as representative. The results have shown us that the number of articles published in this type of journals is increasing, since they are higher in 2017 than in 2016. The number of signatories of each article is also increasing, being in 2016 the 2, 24 the average number and 3.31 in 2017. Analysing the gender variable, there is a notable difference between the two years; the number of men doubles the number of women in 2016, becoming stabilized in 2017. Regarding to the origin of the researchers, in both years studied, it is the USA the country with a higher percentage, followed by Netherlands and United Kingdom. Focusing the attention on Spanish researchers, they are only present in 2016 in the Communication Research magazine and in 2017 in the Journal of Communication. In both cases there is an article in each magazine where two Spanish people participate, doing it in collaboration with other researchers with different nationalities in 2017. In 2016, the most popular topic in scientific publications is health with 25.64%, secondly, it is advertising and communication campaigns with 12.81%, and the third one is social interaction with 11.50%. In 2017, the predominant theme is digital media (Internet, new technologies and social networks) with 30%, followed by social interaction with 21.44% and health communication with 12.58%. Regarding the references, it is concluded that citing themselves are quite frequent and they are increasing, since in 2016, 84.61% of authors cite themselves, increasing the figure in 2017 to 88.57%. It is found that this practice is increasing in order to give greater visibility to the work of the researchers themselves. Also, the tendency is the increase of references to articles of magazines to the detriment of the books, and also less time elapses since an article is published until it is cited, than in the case of books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]