Communication Science Journal Tracker

A lightweight, automatically updated dashboard tracking the most cited, trending, and latest papers from 25 communication science journals across six publishers.

Live site: masurp.github.io/ICA-Journal-Tracker

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Journals covered

ICA

Journal	Abbreviation
Journal of Communication	JOC
Human Communication Research	HCR
Communication Theory	CT
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication	JCMC
Communication, Culture & Critique	CCC
Annals of the International Communication Association	Annals

SAGE

Journal	Abbreviation
Communication Research	CR
New Media & Society	NMS
Social Media + Society	SM+S
Mobile Media & Communication	MMC
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking	CBSN
Journalism	—
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly	JMCQ
European Journal of Communication	EJC

Taylor & Francis

Journal	Abbreviation
Political Communication	PC
Information, Communication & Society	ICS
Digital Journalism	DJ
Media Psychology	MP
Communication Methods and Measures	CMM
Communication Monographs	—
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media	JBEM
Journalism Studies	—

Hogrefe

Journal	Abbreviation
Journal of Media Psychology	JMP

Amsterdam University Press

Journal	Abbreviation
Computational Communication Research	CCR

Cogitatio Press

Journal	Abbreviation
Media and Communication	M&C

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Features

• Most Cited / Trending toggle — switch between all-time citation rankings and papers gaining traction in the last 2 years (minimum 5 citations)
• Latest — most recently published articles per journal
• Show more — load papers 4 at a time; up to 50 per section
• Cross-journal search — find papers by keyword or author name across all journals at once
• Topic chips — 3–4 concise keywords generated by Claude AI from each paper's title and abstract; click to search
• Keyword Trends (overview & per journal):
  • AI Keywords — most frequent AI-generated topic keywords
  • Topic Flow — alluvial chart showing how topics shift across publication years
  • Heatmap — topic frequency across all journals side by side
  • Topic Clusters — keywords grouped by co-occurrence
• Section filter — choose which paper sections (Most Cited / Trending / Latest) feed the trend visualisations
• Year range filter — narrow the Topic Flow chart to a specific range of years

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How it works

A GitHub Actions workflow runs every Monday at 06:00 UTC and:

1. Queries the OpenAlex API for the top 50 most cited, trending (last 2 years, ≥5 citations), and most recently published papers per journal, filtered by ISSN
2. Generates 3–4 concise topic keywords per paper via Claude Haiku (Anthropic API) using title + abstract; results are cached by DOI so already-known papers are never re-enriched
3. Writes static JSON files to data/ and commits them back to main
4. GitHub Pages serves the updated site automatically

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Data sources & notes

• Citation counts — sourced from OpenAlex (cited_by_count), which aggregates across multiple sources and is more complete than Crossref alone
• Most Cited — ranked by total citation count (all time)
• Trending — papers published in the last 2 years with ≥5 citations, ranked by citation count
• Latest — sorted by publication date
• Topic keywords — generated by Claude Haiku from each paper's title and abstract; cached per DOI so only new papers incur an API call on each weekly run

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License

The source code of this project is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 — you are free to share and adapt it for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit.

Paper metadata (titles, authors, abstracts, citation counts) is sourced from OpenAlex. Topic keywords are generated by the Anthropic API (Claude Haiku). This project is not affiliated with ICA or any of the publishers listed.