George Barnett

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at University of California, Davis

This study investigates the interplay between collaboration (coauthorship) citation, bibliographic coupling (citation of a third scholar by two other authors), and co-ethnicity among International Communication Association (ICA) Fellows, distinguished scholars in the field of communication. Analysis of data from over 18,000 publications reveals sig...

ABSTRACT Why do certain articles, particularly innovative ones, go unnoticed in Why do certain articles, particularly innovative ones, go unnoticed in Communication? In light of this issue, two particular articles merit greater Communication? In light of this issue, two particular articles merit greater attention. Nam and Barnett (2010) contribute...

Building on previous research, this study investigates the international migration network and its changes from 1990 to 2017. The findings suggest that certain core countries play pivotal roles in shaping global migration by providing economic opportunities or political refuge. Community detection identified nine groups of nations in 2017, indicati...

This study compares three different methods commonly employed for the determination and interpretation of the subject matter of large corpuses of textual data. The methods reviewed are: (1) topic modeling, (2) community or group detection, and (3) cluster analysis of semantic networks. Two different datasets related to health topics were gathered f...

This study employs social network analysis to describe the structure of collaboration among Fellows of the International Communication Association (ICA), an elite group of social scientists, using co-authorship data gathered from Google Scholar. Network analysis revealed that fellows were loosely connected, consistent with past research on elite sc...

Our research attempts to track the role of coolness factors (i.e., attractiveness, subculture, and uniqueness) on user satisfaction and loyalty with respect to technological products. For this purpose , we construct a model for a particular technological product on the basis of coolness and satisfaction-loyalty theories. We then gather survey-based...

The world’s first gene-edited babies event has stirred controversy on social media over the use of gene editing technology. Understanding public discussions about this controversy will provide important insights about opinions of science and facilitate informed policy decisions. This study compares public discussion topics about gene editing on Twi...

The promise of CRISPR-Cas9 (CRISPR) genomic editing applied to agriculture is promoted widely by scientists. We utilized textual analysis methods to compare perceptions of this innovation held by various stakeholder groups — scientists, policymakers, farmers, and the general public. Results reveal distinctions in the semantic structure and concepts...

The considerable amount of misinformation on social media regarding genetically modified (GM) food will not only hinder public understanding but also mislead the public to make unreasoned decisions. This study discovered a new mechanism of misinformation diffusion in the case of GM food and applied a framework of supervised machine learning to iden...

Using a social network analysis, this study explored how the structure of international tourism has changed longitudinally. The international tourism remained relatively stable from 2002 to 2014. The networks of outbound and inbound international tourism have decentralized gradually. Based on a quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) analysis, each of...

Science communication scholars have debated over what factors are related to public support for science and technology. This study examines the relationship between factual knowledge of gene editing technologies, value predispositions, and general science attitudes among four major U.S. agricultural stakeholder groups: farmers, scientists, policyma...

Vaccine misinformation online may contribute to the increase of anti-vaccine sentiment and vaccine-hesitant behaviors. Social network data was used to identify Twitter vaccine influencers, their online twitter communities, and their geolocations to determine pro-vaccine and vaccine-hesitant online communities. We explored 139,433 tweets and identif...

In the original publication, funding information was missed to update and it should read as follows.

Anti-vaccine information online continues to deter optimum childhood vaccination coverage. Tweets from influential users about childhood vaccines are assessed to determine vaccine information on Twitter. Results indicate a well-connected anti-vaccine community where influential users widely share vaccine misinformation. Sentiment analysis finds neg...

CRISPR-Cas9, a recent gene editing technology, has potential to greatly impact medicine, agriculture, and the environment; therefore, it is increasingly important to understand the public’s perceptions surrounding this technology. This study examined the main themes of CRISPR during a nine-month period on Twitter through semantic network analysis....

This report describes the results of research conducted for the University of California’s Innovative Genomics Institute to determine public perceptions of CRISPR and genome editing. The goal of this research is to design a communication strategy that would, when implemented improve the public’s image of CRISPR. This research was conducted in two p...

This article reviews the opportunities and challenges for computational research methods in the field of communication. Among the social sciences, communication stands out as a discipline with a relatively low-profile institutionalized focus on the in-house development of methods. Computational tools are changing this, and they are catalyzing a new...

Community detection in social networks is widely studied because of its importance in uncovering how people connect and interact. However, little attention has been given to community structure in Facebook public pages. In this study, we investigate the community detection problem in Facebook newsgroup pages. In particular, to deal with the diversi...

Genome editing is an emerging socio-scientific issue. This study uses semantic network analysis to determine the concepts and frames the public is exposed to when seeking information about “genome editing” in Wikipedia and Google. Four frames were identified in Wikipedia: (1) methodology/terminology, (2) applications, (3) common approaches, and (4)...

This paper employs the patent data of four major genetically modified (GM) crops, soybeans, cotton, maize and rapeseed, to illustratee how the innovation of GM crop technology diffused and distributed globally over time. Data collected from the Derwent Innovation Index, were employed to construct country patent citation networks, from 1984 to 2015,...

Barabási (Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life. Basic Books, New York, 2014) argues that a significant proportion of nodes can be randomly removed from any scale-free network without it breaking apart. Gao et al. (Nature 530:307–312, 2016) suggest that three additional pro...

Classification problems have made significant progress due to the maturity of artificial intelligence (AI). However, differentiating items from categories without noticeable boundaries is still a huge challenge for machines -- which is also crucial for machines to be intelligent. In order to study the fuzzy concept on classification, we define and...

Community detection in social networks is widely studied because of its importance in uncovering how people connect and interact. However, little attention has been given to community structure in Facebook public pages. In this study, we investigate the community detection problem in Facebook newsgroup pages. In particular, to deal with the diversi...

This paper examines the international trade of a variety of genetically modified (GM) food products over a 27-year period (1984–2011) with data from the United Nations using the tools of social network analysis. The results indicate that each of the different crops have a distinctive pattern of trade that has changed over time due to a number of di...

This chapter employs semantic network analysis to investigate the online database LexisNexis to study the dynamic co-evolutions of peace frames embedded in the news coverage from the Associated Press (AP--United States), Xinhua News Agency (XH--Mainland China), and South China Morning Post (SCMP—Hong Kong). From 1995 to 2014, while the war and harm...

Making sound food and agriculture decisions is important for global society and the environment. Experts tend to view crop genetic engineering, a technology that can improve yields and minimize impacts on the environment, more favorably than the public. Because there is a causal relationship between public opinion and public policy, it is important...

Diffusion is the process by which new products, behaviors, or ideas are communicated among the members of social systems. This entry describes what is known about the process of the diffusion of innovations and the dissemination of information through the mass media. It differentiates the roles of the media (mass and digital) and interpersonal comm...

This study explores inequality in global internet by looking at structure of co-mentions across global top website domains. Findings show that websites of the U.S. were central and dominant in the global content flow. The network based on the level of corporate ownership was even more centralized, in which the top 10 sites producing at least 1% of...

This chapter describes a number of critical issues facing the field of intercultural communication including, the discipline’s definition, power relations among various ethnic or national groups and nation-states, voice - who speaks for an ethnic group or nation-state, and globalization. But the major portion of the chapter takes a different approa...

This article describes an inter-language semantic network analysis examining the differences between articles about China in the Chinese and English versions of Wikipedia. It explores the differences in the content of Wikipedia through (a) correlation analysis of semantic networks and (b) the salience of semantic concepts through their network cent...

Daily data on the use of the world’s 425 most frequently visited websites by 118 countries were mined over the 4-month period September 1 to December 31, 2015, to create a longitudinal two-mode network (countries and websites). This paper describes the changes in the international World Wide Web (WWW), as a network, to determine the effects of unan...

This study describes the evolution of the international hyperlink network. The World Wide Web is a distributed hypertext system consisting of a virtual network of content and hyperlinks with billions of interlinked pages. Since the Web has no ?engineered architecture,? it can be understood as a self-organized system with a well-defined structure of...

An important challenge in several disciplines is to understand how sudden changes can propagate among coupled systems. Examples include the synchro- nization of business cycles, population collapse in patchy ecosystems, markets shifting to a new technology platform, collapses in prices and in confidence in financial markets, and protests erupting i...

This paper explores the use of spectral or frequency domain analysis to examine network evolution and co-evolution. Given a sufficient number of measurements of a valued network over-time, a matrix (Κ) may be created, where κij is the squared coherency between nodes i and j. Since Κ is a matrix of relations, it may be analyzed like any other networ...

This study describes the structure of the international Facebook friendship network and its determinants using various predictors, including physical proximity, cultural homophily, and communication. Network analysis resulted in one group of nations, with countries that bridge geographic and linguistic clusters (France, Spain, United Kingdom, and U...

This paper extends the theoretical arguments of the world-systems perspective to the emerging post-industrial society. Using survey data gathered by AT&T and published in the World's Telephones (1978-1990) and data gathered by the International Institute of Communication and published in TeleGeography (1991-1992), this paper describes the process o...

Culture is thought to be determinant of society’s framing activities. In the era of globalization, the world’s media provides a series of arena in which symbolic interactions and competitions are being carried out among various cultural groups on the macro level. Their purpose is to negotiate the reality of the perceived world and the dominant worl...

Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) controversies have been hot button issues in China, one of the largest GMO consumption countries, and have gained extensive attention from the public in recent years. Public perception and opinion about GMO technology are shaped by media to a certain degree. Overall use of social media for news consumption show...

This paper explores international relations as expressed in social media. Specifically, it examines the networks of nation-states as determined by the co-mentions of 218 countries expressed in postings on Facebook and Weibo. Co-mentions of all pairs of country names on Facebook were obtained using Google.com with a global search query: “United King...

This paper presents an application of semantic network analysis to the study of online support forums. These forums are a major source for people seeking information about depression and social support. The present study examines the themes in the online posts and comments, and the established links among the themes in comments that correspond with...

Online support forum provides a platform for information exchange and mutual support among people who face special health interests and vulnerabilities. In this study, we adopted a semantic network approach and explored the online support seeking undertaken by breast cancer patients. Previous studies found that breast cancer patients get online pri...

This paper provides a network analysis of the international flow of students among 210 countries and the factors determining the structure of this flow. Among these factors, bilateral hyperlink connections between countries and the number of telephone minutes (communication variables) are the most important predictors of the flow’s structure, follo...

Hyperlink network analysis has provided an important framework for understanding the structure of the Internet/WWW. However, the inclusion of other measures provides additional information about the structure of the web. This research presents still another approach to describe the structure of the Internet/WWW by assessing the network of websites'...

This entry provides a brief introduction to the topic of social and communication networks and their analysis. It then discusses specific applications to the study of digital social/communication networks using a two-dimensional typology for the organization of network studies of digital networks. One dimension is the size or scope of the examined...

Macro-societal structures likely affect news framing and frame dynamics in different ways in different national or cultural contexts. A semantic network analysis was conducted to investigate how national political culture shapes news frames for international political coverage. While cultural characteristics of frames used by news agencies covering...

This chapter provides a general introduction to social network analysis, with a particular focus on communication networks. Network analysis is a set of research methods for identifying structures in systems based on the patterns of relations among system components. It discusses the history of social network analysis, structural theory -- the para...

This paper describes a comparative study examining the effects of macro-societal structures on news framing and the convergence of news frames overtime. By conducting a semantic network analysis, it investigates how national cultures shape news frames about violence, and finds that the unique words with high centralities and unique words not presen...

This study analyzed the hyperlink (co-link) network structure among companies in global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) system. This study measured network variables such as density and centrality, including degree centrality, eigenvector centrality, closeness, and betweenness. The results indicated that European companies had relatively cent...

This paper is a comparative study examining the effects of macro-societal structures on news framing and frame dynamics in an international context. By conducting a semantic network analysis, it investigates how national political cultures shape news frames of international political coverage, and finds that cultural characteristics of frames used...

This paper describes the results of a multi-level network analysis of web-citations among the 1,000 universities with the greatest presence on the world wide web. Using data from January 2011, it describes the web-citation network of the world’s universities and ascertains the antecedent factors that determine its structure. At the university level...

Social media communication is characterized by reduced anonymity and off-to-online social interactions. These characteristics require scholars to revisit social influence mechanisms online. The current study builds on social influence literature to explore social network and gender effects on online behavior. Findings from a quasi-experiment sugges...

This study investigates international hyperlink networks and their content in terms of the .com domain, the most ubiquitous generic top-level domain, to examine the kinds of global websites that are linked to .com, what the linked contents are, and who are dealing with the hyperlinks. The results show the hyperlink network of websites with outgoing...

This research examines who controls the international Internet using a multi-level network analysis. Internet provider (IP) address ownership data obtained from TeleGeography (http://www.telegeography.com/) are used to describe the structure of the international network of private companies and Internet service providers (ISPs). The results indicat...

Introduction to Network Analysis of Social and Digital Media Minitrack.

This article examines the network structure of the international internet using four different sources of data: (1) bilateral bandwidth between countries; (2) hyperlink connections among nations’ domain names; (3) structural equivalence of nations from the perspective of websites, measured by the percentage of specific websites’ traffic from indivi...

This paper explores the influences of the traditional Chinese culture on social relations in China. It provides an introduction to the concept of Guanxi, the notion that social connections are based on socially situated reciprocity. This is different from social interaction in Western society that is based on self-interest and equity. Guanxi repres...

This research examines the relationship between a country’s position in the international telecommunications (telephone and Internet) network and whether or not it is a state sponsor or a provider of sanctuary for terrorists. It also examines the structure of global news coverage of terrorism. A longitudinal analysis of international telephone call...

This research explores the structure and status of theories used in Communication as an alternative for Communication discipline identity research and characteristics evaluation. This research assumes that communication theories are not only ongoing practices of intellectual communities, but also discourse about how theory can address a range of ch...

Scholarly communication (sometimes called “scientific communication”) refers to studies of the dissemination of knowledge through scholars' activities including memberships in professional organizations, hiring practices, and academic publication (journals, books, conference papers). Because of the diverse subject matter and variety of theoretical...

This paper reviews current knowledge about the structure of the international telecommunications network and how it has changed over time as a result of globalization, historical events, and changes in technology. It has a center-periphery structure with North America and Western Europe at the center, and less economically developed countries at th...

Introduction to the Communication and Social Networks Minitrack

Along with individuals’ ideological factors, various network properties play a crucial role in the process of legislators’ political decision-making. Social networks among legislators provide relational resources through which communication occurs, exerting social influence among the members in a network. This chapter examines six social relationsh...

The science of social network analysis has co-evolved with the development of online environments and computer-mediated communication. Unique and precise data available from computer and information systems have allowed network scientists to explore novel social phenomena and develop new methods. Additionally, advances in the structural analysis an...

In this study, we examined the structure of the international hyperlink network as a global communication system at two different points in time (2003 and 2009). Research was carried out on the web-based network linking country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) that represent countries, using hyperlink connectivity by the means of network analysis. T...

This article describes the results of a network analysis based on the citation among Communication journals and those academic disciplines that are cited by those journals labeled as “Communication” by the Web of Science. The results indicate that the journals indexed solely as Communication rather than those also tagged as another social science a...

One unresolved issue in international telecommunications research is the examination of the international hyperlink network that includes the ubiquitous .com domain. Based on the assumption that decomposing or ‘‘cracking’’ .com leads to a more accurate description of the international hyperlink network, this research proposes a method for decomposi...

The current analysis examines the relationship between measures (R-scores, S-scores, faculty productivity) utilized in the recently published National Research Council NRC report and communication doctoral programs’ centrality in the faculty-hiring network. Correlations among the network indicators and the NRC ratings were generally moderate and ne...

Data from 1,581 faculty members affiliated with 98 doctoral-granting Communication programs in the United States were analyzed to determine normative publication rates and predictors of position centrality in the faculty hiring network. The Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS) database was used to measure publication frequency in r...

Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Volume 10, No.1: 43-54 KWWS ��G[�GRL�RUJ����������MFHD��������������April/May 2011 |43 Communication and the Evolution of SNS: Cultural Convergence Perspective Keynote Speech at the International Conference on SNS (Social Networking Service) in honor of the 100

This study analyzes longitudinal trends in Korean use of (1) domestic mail, (2) international mail, (3) domestic telephone calls, (4) international outgoing telephone calls, (5) telex, (6) mobile telephones, (7) televisions and (8) the internet to examine the media’s displacement or supplementary effects.The results show that international mail, do...

Along with individuals’ ideological factors, various network properties play a crucial role in the process of legislators’ political decision making. Social networks among legislators provide relational resources through which communication occurs, exerting social influence among the members in a network. This paper examines six social relationship...

Politicians' Web sites have been considered a medium for organizing, mobilizing, and agenda-setting, but extant literature lacks a systematic approach to interpret the Web sites of senators—a new medium for political communication. This study classifies the role of political Web sites into relational (hyperlinking) and topical (shared-issues) aspec...

This research examines the prestige of doctoral degree programs in communication based on a network analysis of program links among 102 doctoral programs and 2,194 tenure-track faculty members. University of Wisconsin-Madison (Journalism & Mass Communication), Michigan State University (Communication), University of Texas-Austin (Communication Stud...

Using network analysis, this study examines the current structure of international music trade flow and its determinants. International music trade data from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics database are employed to describe the international music flow network and how it changed between 2002 and 2006. Network analysis reveals the imba...

This article examines the structure of the Korean Society for Journalism and Communication Studies (KSJCS) and the International Communication Association (ICA) based on the division membership of scholars. Theoretically, hybridization as coexistence of similarities and differences between the two organizations of different cultural backgrounds wer...

Intercultural communication, in many cases, is cross-lingual communication. Effective cross-lingual communication requires successful translation processes. Translation quality involves two factors, the technical and the linguistic. Focusing on the influence of language factor, this study demonstrates the application of semantic network analysis an...

This article examines the impact of the Internet and the age distribution of research scholars on academic citation age with a mathematical model proposed by Barnett, Fink, and Debus (1989) and a revised model that incorporates information about the online environment and scholar age distribution. The modified model fits the data well, accounting f...