Research on Television Series: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

With series on conventional television and pay TV platforms now a key element of media consumption, they have gained increasing academic attention in the last decade, both as a main object of study and in combination with other social phenomena. However, the boundaries of this line of research, which draws together researchers from different fields, have become increasingly blurred. This paper undertook a bibliometric investigation to understand how this line of research has come about, what its characteristics are, the main streams within it, and the extent to which the rise in publications reflects a mature and consolidated field of research in its own right. This analysis focused on the development of scientific production on television series indexed by database Scopus between 2010 and 2019 (n = 1,679 documents). More specifically, this study analyzed authorship, journals, national output and international collaboration, co-citation of keywords to ascertain the main intellectual trends in the area and the co-occurrence of references to find out if there is a theoretical body of works that serve as a foundation for this research. The results show symptoms of immaturity, such as a lack of continuity in authority, little concurrence between specialized journals and the most cited authors and works, vagueness in both the keyword clusters and the papers that are often cited together. In addition, a large number of the most cited works come from fields outside Communication that consider television series an accessory aspect of their main theme, such as their impact on the influx of tourists as a result due to the consumption of cultural works. On the other hand, this points to a strong, versatile line of research capable of hosting research on new and old media and related to various topics.