Computational Communication Research

Aims & Scope

CCR is an online only journal that encourages and facilitates the sharing of 1) developments in computational tools and methods, and 2) the application of computational methods to answer theoretical questions about (human) communication. It accepts rigorous, relevant computational work on all topics in communication science. 

There are currently many excellent journals in the field that accept and promote computational communication research.  Most, however, do so because computational methods overlap with a subject area of interest. As a result, computational researchers often must shoehorn their work to fit the topical aims of these journals and current computational work is scattered over the various journals of our respective subfields, even though the methods and challenges can be highly similar. By gathering this work in a single venue, CCR facilitates the timely generation and distribution of computational research outputs among peers with shared interest and enhance the significance and visibility of computational methods in communication research.

CCR will facilitate and generally require tools and data to be shared on accepted platforms and stimulate the publication of tools and data sets as stand-alone contributions. CCR encourages preregistration of studies.

Peer-review process

CCR publishes articles only after a rigorous peer-review process. CCR strives towards quick publication, as the speed of computational developments quickly outpaces current publication cycles. Besides encouraging quick reviews and taking quick decisions, this will be facilitated by a two-phase review process.

In phase one, a traditional double blind ‘adversarial’ review takes place, where the central task for the reviewer and editors is to judge whether a manuscript is (potentially) publishable. The outcome of phase one, which can hopefully be done in a single review round, is a conditional decision (intent) to publish. 

After the conditional decision to publish, the author is encouraged to publish the manuscript on a preprint archive like SSRN or SocArXiv. The journal website will link to this manuscript as a ‘working paper’. Any revisions in this phase are not required to be blinded. The reviewers get the option to be publicly identified on the article if published.

Editorial Board

Editor in chief:

Wouter van Atteveldt (VU Amsterdam)

Associate Editors:

• Cuihua (Cindy) Shen (UC Davis)
• Damian Trilling (University of Amsterdam)
• Drew Margolin (Cornell University)
• Rene Weber (UC Santa Barbara)

Editorial board:

Assistant editor:

Mónika Simon (University  of Amsterdam)

Computational Communication Research
info@computationalcommunication.org

Submission Guidelines

CCR is an open access, online only journal that encourages and facilitates the sharing of 1) developments in computational tools and methods, and 2) the application of computational methods to answer theoretical questions about (human) communication.

CCR welcomes the publication of:

• Traditional full-length articles (max 9,000 words) as well as short communications (3,000 – 4,000 words). Computer science and some social science outlets (e.g. Political Analysis or APSR)
• commonly publish articles in the 3000-4000 word range. Results can often be interesting without lengthy theoretical reflections.
• Descriptions of novel tools, methods, and data sets, provided they are valid, well documented, and relevant to communication research.
• Explorative and null findings, provided they are theoretically relevant and methodologically rigorous.
• Tutorials (including code examples) that explain the usage and best practices of a particular tool or method in communication research.
• Software or tool announcements. This is a very short (2-3 page) paper that essentially describes the overall goal of the software and gives a short explanation of how it can be used. These announcements go through editorial review only so they can be published very quickly. The publication will make it clear that it has not been peer reviewed and that no full code review or audit has been performed.

CCR is funded primarily through sponsorships and donations. CCR does not charge a subscription fee and does not currently charge a mandatory article processing fee.

See the following link for more information on the Submission and Author Guidelines.

Submission Preparation Checklist

Please follow this link to the Submission Preparation Checklist