La investigación sobre comunicación en España en los últimos 25 años (1990-2014). Objetos de estudio y métodos aplicados en los trabajos publicados en revistas españolas especializadas.

After its institutionalisation during the early 1970s through the creation of the first faculties of Communication Sciences, Spanish communication research consolidates as a disciplinary field in the 1990s. During this period, the increasing number of universities degrees on communication studies led to an exponential growth of the academic community and, so, of the scientific production in the field. The enormous efforts of meta-research carried out in the last decade, specially focused on the study of peer-reviewed journals, and to lesser extent of PhD theses, have allowed the reconstruction of some relevant aspects of the current communication research in Spain. Nevertheless, these studies have not considered sufficiently those elements which would allow to identify the general epistemological orientation followed by the scientific activity in the field of communication. This paper intends to contribute to this research line. For this purpose, a content analysis has been applied to a sample of 1098 papers published between 1990 and 2014 by six major peer-reviewed communication journals, in order to observe the evolution of the objects of study and the methodological procedures in Spanish communication research during this period. The results show a progressive diversification of the objects of study, the pre-eminence of the studies on media content, a growing neglect of the institutional dimension of the media system (companies, professionals, markets, public policies, etc.), a decreasing interest on theoretical research, a gradual improvement of the methodological standards of empirical research, and a growing dominance of quantitative research, specially by means of content analysis applied to media documents (news, advertisements, television series, etc.). The observed trends are put for discussion considering the consequences that could have be generated on Spanish communication research by the changes of the media system (the growth of the communication sector, the advent of digitalization, etc.) and by the updated institutional context (the autonomy of university degrees in communication studies, the implementation of the Academia teaching acreditation programme) on which scientific activity has deveolped over the past 25 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]