Hot topics and frontiers in AI and communication research

Abstract

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is constantly increasing across communication research and practice, yet no study has systematically mapped the hot topics and evolving frontiers of this literature over the past decade. This paper addresses this gap by examining the status and development of AI and communication research based on publication and citation data from the Web of Science (WoS) database from 2015 to 2025. Using a purposive sampling strategy, researchers searched the WoS database with the keywords “artificial intelligence,” “AI,” “communication,” “bibliometrics,” “bibliometric analysis,” and “research trends,” restricting the search to English-language, peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2025. Bibliometric mapping (VOSviewer and CiteSpace) was applied to 499 articles to identify hot topics and trace the evolution of research frontiers. Six thematic clusters emerged: AI and big data in communication, algorithms and automation in journalism, dissemination of information in social media, the risks of disinformation, the social and cultural impact of generative AI, and the ethical dimensions of synthetic texts. The six identified themes accounted for 196, 128, 84, 20, 8, and 3 documents, respectively, with cluster 0 (AI, ChatGPT, and generative AI in communication) emerging as the dominant research focus after 2023, alongside the growing presence of other generative AI systems such as Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot in communication-related applications. The evolution of research frontiers revealed three phases: an early operational phase focused on algorithms and automation in journalism (2015-2021), followed by a phase centered on deep learning-based applications, and a third phase (2022-2025) marked by large-scale language models (ChatGPT) and generative AI in creative content production and language-based communication.