Between democratic ideals and platform pressures: Mapping local media research through bibliometric analysis (1977–2024)

Abstract

Local media research has long been pulled between two demands: the normative expectation that local journalism sustains democratic life, and the structural reality of a digitally reconfigured media environment in which the conditions for that work are eroding. This study examines how that tension has shaped the development of the field through a bibliometric analysis of 1,088 publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) core collection between 1977 and 2024. Drawing on temporal trends, citation patterns, co-authorship networks, and keyword co-occurrences, the analysis traces both the quantitative expansion and the thematic reorientation of the literature. Two turning points stand out: a 1990s shift toward political participation and community engagement, and a post-2012 turn toward digital transformation, platform dependency, and the integration of social media into local news ecosystems. Geographic concentration in the USA, Spain, Australia, and England, alongside the marginal but growing visibility of Latin American and Asian scholarship, indicates that the field’s intellectual map is shaped not only by the substance of local media but by uneven structures of academic visibility. These patterns suggest that local media research has functioned less as a geographically defined subfield than as a theoretical space in which communication scholarship negotiates the tension between journalism’s democratic ideals and the structural pressures of an increasingly platformized media environment. The corpus is limited to publications indexed in the WoS core collection, classified under communication, and retrieved through terms appearing in article titles. Just over half of the corpus (552 of 1,088 records) is indexed in the social sciences citation index and almost two-fifths (420) in the emerging sources citation index, which points to a field that is consolidating but still only partially represented in the most established indexes. The article therefore treats the bibliometric record as a visible, indexed part of local media scholarship rather than the whole field and interprets its development through the relationship between democratic expectations, structural media change, and uneven scholarly visibility.