Research Productivity in Development Communication in the Philippines

Abstract

Pioneered in the 70s by Nora Quebral of the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, Development Communication (DevCom) is now recognized globally as a scientific discipline. As such, it is now a part of the research and development (R&D) agenda of national and international research organizations. For almost four decades, no study has been conducted to find out the research productivity in DevCom in the Philippines. We conducted in-depth analysis on the total number of publications and total number of citations of DevCom publications collected from Thomson ISI database. From the 70s to the present, 74 articles were published. The most dominant domains were on health communication (31.08 %) and agricultural communication (29.72%). On the other hand, the most predominant approaches were social mobilization (44.59%) and behavior change (41.89%). With 74 articles, it can be concluded that research productivity of DevCom in the Philippines is low. This paper presents ways to improve publication performance in DevCom in the country. Future studies may focus on identifying the factors that facilitate or impede publication performance of DevCom researchers and educators.