Abstract
Divides among academic knowledge and practitioner needs have been well documented in technical communication and related fields. However, the recent popularity of practitioner publications indicates a timely moment to reassess the relationships among academic and nonacademic influencers in emerging communication design knowledge. In this paper, we introduce initial findings from the first phase of an ongoing research project that analyzes citation practices in communication design publications. First, we created a sample of over 1500 citations from 30 recent peer-reviewed journal articles that treat emerging communication design themes. Next, we coded authors or author teams from the 30 original articles and the 1500 cited publications to identify whether each author or author team was comprised of academic research faculty, nonacademics, or both. Based on this analysis, we show that academic citations comprise just over 60 percent of the total number in our sample. While this is a clear majority, non-academic citations do frequently influence the shape of peer-reviewed work on emerging communication design themes. Based on our findings, we argue for extending citation analysis to a larger sample of peer-reviewed journal articles and different publications types (i.e., proceedings, books, trade magazines, blogs, social media conversations) in order to test our findings. We furthermore call for social network analysis (SNA) that can reveal more complex interconnections among academic researchers and industry or independent thought leaders around topics such as user experience, content management and strategy, and project management.