Communication is the study of how humans share information across all levels of society – from the individual to the international – using a diversity of methods, theories, and areas of study. The Communication Studies Research Network on SSRN is an open access preprint server that provides a venue for authors to showcase their research papers in our digital library, speeding up the dissemination and providing the scholarly community access to groundbreaking working papers and early-stage research. SSRN provides the opportunity to share different outputs of research such as preprints, preliminary or exploratory investigations, book chapters, PhD dissertations, course and teaching materials, presentations, and posters among others. SSRN also helps Communications scholars discover the latest research in their own and other fields of interest, while providing a platform for the early sharing of their own work, making it available for subsequent work to be built upon more quickly.
Communication researchers, informed by intellectual traditions from the humanities and other social sciences, study the attributes of communicators, the content of messages, the role of media, and the characteristics of audiences which influence the effects of communication. Interdisciplinary by nature, studies often focus on communication processes in the context of other disciplines – such as education, health, law and politics – as well as basic research into interpersonal, group, intergroup and international communication. Communication also incorporates occupational areas – such as journalism, marketing and public relations – which focus on information transmission to the public. SSRN offers access to both established and new areas of communication, allowing researchers to learn from and contribute to this rapidly developing field.