About IC Revista Cientifica de Informacion y Comunicacion

IC — Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación — Journal Profile

IC — Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación (in English renderings, the Scientific Journal of Information and Communication) is a Spanish annual journal of communication studies published from the Department of Journalism I of the University of Seville. It carries the print ISSN 1696-2508 and the electronic ISSN 2173-1071. Founded in 2003 by Professor Manuel Bernal of the department, IC was a print publication for its first decade; since its tenth issue, in 2013, it has been managed professionally through the Open Journal Systems platform and published in dual format, print and digital, with full text free to read online. Its mission, in its own presentation, is to contribute analysis, reflection, debate and theoretical critique in the field of communication — a field it expressly refuses to reduce to a set of professional techniques — and its editorial identity is openly critical: its description in international open-access listings speaks of inter- and transdisciplinary, heterogeneous and heterodox approaches, and of an editorial team actively committed to social change, public emancipation, environmental protection and the culture of peace. It publishes in Spanish and English, charges authors nothing at any stage, and is indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index. OpenAlex, resolving its source record from the journal’s ISSNs, counted 453 works under its name at the time of checking for this profile.

Identity and History

IC belongs to a recognisable species: the university department journal with a doctrine. It is linked, as its official presentation states, to the Department of Journalism I (Departamento de Periodismo I) of the University of Seville, within the university’s Faculty of Communication, and it was founded in 2003 by Professor Manuel Bernal, a member of that department. The founding date and the annual rhythm together explain the journal’s issue numbering, which can be checked against its own articles: issue 11 is dated 2014, issue 14 is dated 2017, issue 15 is dated 2018 and issue 19 is dated 2022 — one issue per year, each January, counting from the 2003 founding. Faculty news from the University of Seville has named Professor David Montero Sánchez as the journal’s director in its more recent period.

The journal’s material history has two eras. In the first, from 2003, IC was a print-only publication, produced in Seville in the traditional manner of Spanish university journals. In the second, beginning with issue 10 in 2013, the journal adopted professional manuscript management through the OJS platform and a dual print-and-digital format, with the digital edition accessible in full text, free of charge. Its articles carry DOIs in the prefix 10.12795/IC — for example 10.12795/IC.2022.I19.21 for an article in issue 19 — and are deposited in the University of Seville’s research repository, idUS, which is how many readers outside Spain encounter them. OpenAlex records the journal’s homepage at its OJS address, icjournal-ojs.org, and the university’s editorial service presents the title in its journal portfolio.

The journal’s public milestones are those of a title consolidating its standing. The University of Seville’s Faculty of Communication announced the journal’s admission to the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Thomson Reuters (now the Web of Science ESCI of Clarivate), quoting the editorial view that inclusion in such indexes attracts more and better contributions. A later faculty report noted that, in a ranking of communication publications built on ESCI data for 2017/18 and published by the journal Comunicar, IC placed among the ten best Spanish communication publications and at position 88 worldwide in the specialty. Those are the faculty’s own reports of the journal’s standing, and they are cited here as such; the current position of any journal in any ranking should be confirmed in the ranking itself.

Scope and Subjects

IC’s scope is communication studied critically and theoretically: information, communication and culture approached from inter- and transdisciplinary positions, with epistemological and theoretical concerns that go beyond technical or professional insight into the media industries. Its official presentation frames the mission as analysis, reflection, debate and theoretical critique, pursued with a declared scientific vocation and an intention to serve as a platform both for established academics and thinkers and for researchers beginning or continuing their work. The journal’s description in the open-access listing of the International Association for Media and Communication Research adds the editorial commitments that give the scope its flavour: social change, public emancipation, environmental protection and the culture of peace.

The published articles show what that means in practice. An article in issue 19 (2022) examined memory and counter-revolutionary propaganda in Russia through a state-backed historical film about the Decembrist movement, reading cinema as an instrument of official memory policy. An article in issue 14 (2017) studied how public service broadcasters in seven Western Balkan countries use online channels to interact with fragmented audiences. Issue 11 (2014) carried work on war, propaganda and imaginary nation-building in the first Chechen war, and on neo-burlesque theatre as a counter-hegemonic practice. Issue 15 (2018) carried a study of memory and trauma in cinema. The through-line is plain: media, film, journalism and digital communication read against power — propaganda, hegemony, public service, memory, gender and resistance. OpenAlex’s topic classification for the source agrees, grouping it under media studies and communication, journalism and media studies, media and digital communication, and the history of media and communication. A manuscript that treats communication as a neutral technique will fit this journal badly; a manuscript that treats communication as a field of social struggle, meaning and critique will find its conversation here.

Language is part of the scope. The journal has a clear international vocation, in its own description, and publishes articles in Spanish and English, and exceptionally in other languages. Its centre of gravity is the Spanish-speaking academy, with Seville as the hub, but the English-language articles and the Balkan, Russian and Latin American subject matter in its pages show the vocation is practised, not merely declared.

Reading the Archive: Four Articles

Four articles, taken from the journal’s own deposited record, show the range inside the critical brief. In issue 11 (2014), Adrián Tarín Sanz of the University of Seville traced how the first post-Soviet Chechen war (1994–1996) was used to build national imaginaries in Russia, following the conflict through media coverage and myth-making; the article’s own front matter records that it was received on 20 May 2014 and accepted on 5 August 2014, a concrete glimpse of the journal’s review turnaround in that period. The same issue carried a study of the Sexual Overtones, Ottawa’s largest neo-burlesque troupe, reading striptease and bodily humour as techniques of pleasure and resistance, and working through Foucault on biopower and Butler on performativity to argue that such performance is double-edged — transgressing norms while also reproducing them. Issue 14 (2017) carried the Western Balkans study of public service broadcasters, built on a Fribourg and Sarajevo research project’s evidence from 2014 to 2016 about how broadcasters facing digitalised production and fragmented audiences try to rebuild trust and interaction online. Issue 15 (2018) carried a study of memory and trauma in cinema centred on the S-21 prison in Cambodia, where a survivor-painter confronts a former guard on camera and the absence of photographs of torture itself becomes the subject. Propaganda and memory, performance and power, public media under strain, cinema and atrocity: the archive is varied in object and unified in attitude, which is exactly what an editorial doctrine is for.

Those articles also travel. They are deposited in idUS, the University of Seville’s open repository, with their DOIs in the 10.12795/IC prefix, their abstracts in Spanish and English, and their keywords in both languages, so a reader who finds the journal through a search engine lands on a complete, citable record rather than a bare title page. For a single-issue-per-year journal, that repository presence matters disproportionately: the annual volume is small, but each article in it is permanently and openly addressable, and the citation trail that OpenAlex and Scopus build begins from exactly those deposits.

The Journal and Its University

IC is best understood as one instrument of a faculty’s research culture. It is presented in the University of Seville’s editorial portfolio alongside the university’s other journals, with the editorial service based at the university’s Isla de la Cartuja campus address in Seville, and the Faculty of Communication reports on its fortunes — its admission to the Emerging Sources Citation Index, its standing in specialty rankings — as faculty news, in the same breath as the faculty’s other journal, REDES.COM. The ESCI announcement, carried on the faculty site, describes the journal in terms that match its own presentation: an annual journal published in January, a mission of analysis, reflection, debate and theoretical critique for those who do not restrict communication to professional techniques, a clear international vocation with articles in Spanish and English, a rigorous peer-review system, a publication ethics code, OJS manuscript management and dual print-and-digital format with free full text. When a university describes its own journal that carefully, in public, it is making a claim about the kind of scholarship it wants to house; IC’s two decades of continuous annual publication are the faculty keeping that claim.

The Russian-propaganda article in issue 19 shows the doctrine applied to a hard case. Its author, a University of Seville researcher, argued that the Kremlin’s memory policies work to head off social protest and to justify the present political system, that the conservative turn in Russian public life travels with a memory strategy the article names the “frame of war”, and that a “media methodology” accompanies it, one of whose aims is to discredit earlier revolutionary myths through productions of the state broadcaster Channel One; the Decembrist film at the centre of the study is read as a course in that method. Whatever a reader thinks of the argument, its presence in the journal is diagnostic: this is a venue where a film review can be, at the same time, an essay on state power, historical memory and media method, and where the editors regard that combination as the journal’s core business rather than a departure from it.

Editorial Model and Peer Review

IC is an annual journal, published each January, and its workflow is built around that single yearly deadline cycle. Manuscripts are managed through the OJS platform, which the journal adopted in 2013. The university’s account of the journal describes a rigorous manuscript evaluation system conducted under the peer-review formula, and the journal maintains a publication ethics code governing its editorial and refereeing principles. The presentation adds two quality practices worth naming: the journal uses tools to guard against plagiarism, and it monitors received articles to guarantee good scientific practice. For an annual, a rigorous review round has a practical consequence authors should plan around: a paper that misses one January cycle, or that needs a further round of revision, may wait a full year for its next window, so the journal rewards manuscripts that arrive complete, correctly formatted and already in conversation with the critical literature the journal publishes.

The journal’s economics are those of the classic university press model. Its official presentation states plainly that there is no cost associated with submitting, publishing or editing articles in IC — no submission fee, no article processing charge, no page charge. The costs of the journal are borne by the institution, and the product is given away: the presentation declares the journal’s adherence to the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition, under which users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search and link to the full text of its articles, which are published under Creative Commons licences. Authors weighing venues on principle as well as prestige will recognise the model: publicly funded, free to publish, free to read.

Metrics and Indexing

OpenAlex counted 453 works and 496 citations for the journal’s source record (S4306512701) at the time of checking, with an h-index of 8 on OpenAlex’s own citation graph, and yearly counts of 37 works for 2021, 33 for 2022, 24 for 2023, 21 for 2024 and 14 for 2025. For an annual journal those yearly counts include the journal’s full contents for each issue — articles, reviews and editorial matter as the database ingests them — and the recent decline in the counts may reflect ingestion timing as much as issue size, so the figures are reported here as OpenAlex’s picture at checking time, not as a claim about the journal’s current volume. SCImago’s Scopus-based listing for Spanish communication journals places IC at an SJR of 0.173 in the third quartile (Q3), with 12 documents counted for 2025; the older thin record on this site quoted an h-index of 5, from the Scopus-derived data of its day. As elsewhere in this directory, each figure is attached to its source, because OpenAlex and Scopus count different archives over different windows and their numbers are not interchangeable.

The journal’s index list, on the evidence fetched for this profile, includes the Emerging Sources Citation Index, announced by its faculty; Scopus, the basis of the SCImago listing; and OpenAlex, with deposit of its articles in the University of Seville’s idUS repository. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by each ISSN, carried out for this profile, returned no record for the title at the time of checking — a result reported here precisely because it may surprise readers: the journal is open access in practice and by its own declared adherence to the Budapest definition, whatever the state of its directory listings on a given day. Readers who need the journal’s presence in a specific index for an evaluation should verify that index directly.

How to Submit

Submissions go through the journal’s OJS platform, at the journal site recorded in OpenAlex (icjournal-ojs.org). Write in Spanish or English; frame the paper as analysis, reflection, debate or theoretical critique in communication, information or culture; situate it in the critical and interdisciplinary literature the journal favours; and expect rigorous peer review under the journal’s ethics code, with plagiarism screening of submissions. There is no charge at any stage. Because the journal appears once a year, in January, authors should consult the journal’s site for the current call and its deadlines before preparing a manuscript — the annual cycle, not a rolling queue, governs when work can appear. Book reviews and translations have a place in Spanish communication journals of this tradition generally, but this profile claims no specific section policy for IC beyond what its official presentation states; the journal’s own pages are the authority.

Similar Journals

IC’s closest relative in this directory is CIC — Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación, the annual journal of the Complutense University of Madrid, a different title from a different university and department, sharing only the broad field and the annual rhythm; the two are sometimes confused by name, and their ISSNs (CIC carries 1135-7991 and 1988-4001) settle any doubt. Other Spanish communication journals in the same SCImago landscape — Comunicar, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, Doxa Comunicación, Tripodos, Index.comunicación — cover overlapping ground with different editorial doctrines, from education-focused to industry-facing; IC’s distinction among them is its explicitly critical, theory-first brief and its Seville departmental home. Readers following its themes will also find the culture-and-peace and social-change strands of its scope continued in Latin American communication journals indexed in the same services.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of IC? Print ISSN 1696-2508 and electronic ISSN 2173-1071.

Who publishes IC? The Department of Journalism I of the University of Seville, Spain; the journal was founded in 2003 by Professor Manuel Bernal of that department.

How often does IC appear? Once a year, in January.

Is IC open access? Yes. The journal adheres to the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition, its full text is free online, and its articles appear under Creative Commons licences.

Does IC charge authors? No. Its official presentation states there is no cost for submission, publication or editing of articles.

What languages does IC publish? Spanish and English, and exceptionally other languages.

How are manuscripts reviewed? By rigorous peer review, under a publication ethics code, with plagiarism-screening tools, as the university’s presentation describes.

What are IC’s metrics? OpenAlex counted 453 works, 496 citations and an h-index of 8 at checking time; SCImago’s Scopus-based listing gives an SJR of 0.173 (Q3). Cite figures with their source.

Is IC the same journal as CIC, Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación? No. CIC is a Complutense University of Madrid journal with different ISSNs; IC is the University of Seville journal profiled here.