Interdisciplinary Journals

Interdisciplinary journals are journals that publish articles from across multiple disciplines. They are also journals that are often outside of one’s own discipline. They may or may not be “located” within one discipline, but cater to a wide array of disciplines or fields. At the same time, these journals focus on a specialty area or publish a specific kind of research—a specialty that crosses disciplinary boundaries. For example, the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (JSPR) and Personal Relationships (PR) are journals that publish research on close relationships (e.g., friendships, romantic relationships, family relationships, work relationships). The goal of these journals is to bring together scholars from a wide array of fields who study close relationships and publish this research. Even though they are not exclusively focused on communication, many interpersonal and family communication scholars publish their work in these journals. A significant amount of the work in these journals focuses on communication, but much of it also focuses on other constructs besides communication (e.g., attachments and how they are associated with relationship satisfaction). Relational scholars from communication, psychology, sociology, family studies, and biobehavioral health, among other disciplines, often publish their work in these types of journals. Regardless of the discipline of the scholars or their topic of study, they all are publishing work that addresses research questions and hypotheses about close relationships.

Another example of an interdisciplinary journal in which communication scholars often publish is Health Communication. The goal of this journal is to bridge the medical sciences with the social sciences and publish research on communication and health. The idea of health could include health campaigns that are designed to improve the health of a particular population, basic and applied research in health contexts, health information and promotion, and/or health outcomes research (e.g., studying how something impacts various physical and/or mental health outcomes). The central feature of this journal is communication messages related to health.

This entry examines how interdisciplinary journals compare to journals within a discipline, the strengths and weaknesses of interdisciplinary journals and the implications of interdisciplinary journals for scholars and scholarship.