Analysis of social networks of scientific production on television programming

Abstract

Television content reflects society, so studying the programming is essential to analyze the evolution of how this media has reflected social changes throughout history. For this purpose, this work analyses research about television programming considering the networks identified among the academic studies. The main aims are: to determine the areas of knowledge where the studies on Television Programming are published; to identify the most relevant documents for the researchers themselves; to determine the predominant topics along history. We use an original methodology based on a Web of Science (WoS) data set and a snowball compilation technique to collect the most significant works in the area, including those external to WoS. To achieve these purposes, we applied two types of content analysis with a strong automatized component; Bibliometric Analysis and Social Network Analysis to scientific documents from the records appearing in WoS Core Collection. The results reveal how the area of Communication and the area of Film, Radio and Television make up more than 50 percent of the total scientific production. In addition  the most relevant papers belong to the area of Communication and the second and third documents with the highest number of citations are published in the field of Medicine. Concerning the topics, we can consider two different areas: the first one studies TV programming in a very specific way: history and evolution, competition, contents and advertising. The second one, focuses on the analysis of the influence of programming on obesity, violence, racism and stereotypes.