Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico

Angle and reach

Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico (Studies about the journalistic message) (ISSN 1134-1629, ISSN-e 1988-2696) is a journal that comes out every three months. It is a scientific publication which promotes research on means of expression and the social functions of journalism and communication. It publishes in Spanish although there are partnerships in other languages that have a large reach such as English, French and Portuguese.

It is split into three sections: Estudios (Studies), a monographic section about an especially important topic which the editorial board of the journal can propose; Investigaciones y Documentos (Research and Documents), a section for papers which fulfil the objectives of the journal as described above; and Bibliografía (Bibliography), which includes criticism and reviews on works which cover any important aspect of journalistic communication.

Publication frequency

Every three months

Protocols for interoperability

Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico (Studies on the Journalistic Message) provides an OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface which enables interoperability between different platforms and repositories by means of exchanging metadata. Protocol OAI-PMH Version 2.0  Metadata formats: Dublin Core; MARC; MARC21; RFC1807 
Route for harvesters:  https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ESMP/oai

History of the journal

Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico is one of the Spanish academic journals with the longest track record in journalism and communication. Founded in 1994 in the Department of Journalism I in the Faculty of Computer sciences at Complutense University, it celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2019. Between 1994 and 2018, a total of 1140 research articles and 239 bibliographical reviews were published. These include a great deal of the best research in journalism and communication over that period.

Bernardino M. Hernando, professor of Journalistic writing, was the driving force behind Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico in his first stage as editor-coordinator of the first three issues. In 1998, José Luis Martínez Albertos, professor of Journalism at Complutense University, became chairman of the editorial board and María Jesús Casals, who was also a professor of Journalism at the same university, was appointed editor of the journal, a post she held until she retired in 2018. In her first twenty years as editor, professor Casals spearheaded the large editorial and scientific development the publication underwent. It came to be indexed in the leading databases and in this way EMP became one of the most prestigious ones in its field.

The journal came about due to its mission to be an academic outlet for the main research in journalism. There was a special focus on the following fields, as indicated by professor Martínez Alberto in issue 4: 1) means of expression in the journalistic message (styles and genres); 2) outstanding categories of contemporary journalism ( interpretative journalism, research, new journalism...); 3) an analysis of the content in messages; 4) organization of the profession of journalism (style guides, editorial guidelines, ethical aspects...); and 5) mechanisms for proceeding from sources in news production. This initial topical area was changed at the end of the 1990´s with the addition of research works from different communication sciences.

In the year 2000, the structure it has today began to take shape: one section was called Estudios sobre un tema monográfico (Studies on a monographic topic); another miscellaneous one was called Investigaciones y documentos (Research and documents); and a third one, called Bibliografía, included criticism and reviews on recently published books on journalism.

Since 2001 the journal has included indexes and abstracts in English and has moved forward in the internationalization process. EMP became one of the leaders in scientific publications in the field of communication in Spain. At the start of the twenty-first century many authors came from Spanish universities and some from Latin America. This has been a constant trend since then and articles have come from practically all six continents. At present, the journal is international to a large degee both in terms of its authors and the make up of the editorial and scientific board.

In 2011, semestral issues of the journal began. Its international renown was first patent in those years and became indexed in the database, the Social Science Citation Index, whose impact rate, the JCR (Journal Citation Reports) is the most valued internationally. At that time, it was also added to Scopus, from the publisher Elsevier, the most renowned one in Europe, as well as other leading databases for indexing scientific journals.

From 2004, the journal was also published in digital format with Open Access (OA) and positioned itself as a journal which embraced Open Access for online scientific texts. All content is freely available for users or their institution. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link the entire texts of articles or use them for any legal purpose, without needing to gain the prior consent of the editor or author. The Predetermined copyright license for the contents is version 4.0 of Creative Commons. In 2017 printing was stopped and from then onwards it only appeared in its digital format.

In 2019, the journal began a new stage in which all the editing and publishing processes were carried out in the Open Journal System(OJS). OJS is the most used open source platform in the administration of scientific journals. In order to streamline editorial processes and cut down the time between research and publishing the articles, the journal started to come out on a quarterly basis.