Desde inicios de siglo hay investigaciones que demuestran la tardía institucionalización de la Comunicación para el Desarrollo y el Cambio Social (CDCS) en España. Este artículo aborda el estudio bibliométrico del campo, analizando las diez principales revistas de Comunicación publicadas entre 2000 y 2012. Las preguntas de investigación que orientan este trabajo son: ¿qué incidencia tiene la CDCS? ¿Hay correspondencia entre el auge del campo y el número de artículos? ¿Qué revistas y autores han publicado? Los resultados apuntan a una presencia marginal en el periodo estudiado, y a un relativo aumento, coincidiendo con la institucionalización del campo en España.

Over recent years, citation practice has become progressively more pertinent to academic production, a relevance that poses the challenge of addressing this object of study not only from a quantitative perspective, but also using qualitative approaches. On the basis of these premises, the aim of this article is to analyze, from a qualitative perspective, the literature on communication for development and social change (CDSC) published in the top 10 communication journals in Spain. To this end, a qualitative analysis of the most frequently cited papers on this topic was performed on the basis of the citation categories suggested by M. G. Erikson and P. A. Erlandson (2014), as well as the implications and consequences of their widespread use. The conclusions of this article point to the predominance of citations that, in many cases, reveal a disturbing disregard for the cited works and a general lack of scholarly debate between authors and conflicting paradigms.

This article renders an account of the rapid institutionalization of the academic field of Communication for Development and Social Change in Spain in recent years following a period of neglect and marginalization. The ongoing expansion of the field of Communication for Development and Social Change in the Spanish context is understood as a process of implosion, i.e., a collapse inwards, which results from the inconsistencies and weaknesses of fast and late institutionalization. The methodological approach for this inquiry is a documental review of both academic literature and research and institutional reports produced in Spain between 1980 and 2010. Based on this review, the article contrasts the trajectory of the field in Spain with the debates at the international level, establishing relevant continuities and differences.

En la actualidad asistimos a un renacer del pensamiento comunicacional latinoamericano (Marques de Melo, 2009) en el seno de las ciencias de la comunicación, que propone una mirada reflexiva y alternativa a las lógicas comunicativas del capitalismo global. El texto de Reyes Mate, Pensar en español aquí y ahora (2008), se utiliza en este artículo como piedra angular del análisis de este renacer, por su capacidad para estimular el estudio de las aportaciones específicas de la Comunicación para el Cambio Social en español al conjunto del campo de la comunicación y, quizá, también a otros campos del conocimiento. Así, las ideas que lo estructuran son: 1) el pensamiento comunicación en español es, en la actualidad, un pensamiento dependiente; 2) la comunicación no puede ser inmoral y 3) Pensar la comunicación desde el sur para un pensamiento comunicacional crítico de ida y vuelta.

The social theory that has been constructed in Latin America in the past twenty years, proposes an alternative to the traditional criteria of science boundaries. This alternative approach, oriented towards social emancipation, is gaining ground over the predominant tendency, which is to subsume knowledge into an intensive process of commoditization. Anti-globalist movements are amongst the social players that have a leading role in the development of new ways of building knowledge. These movements act based on a new relationship between processes of social change, knowledge-building and the meaning and direction of communication. In this context, communication and information cease to be instruments for the regulation and control of social behavior. The tensions arising from the market and the predominating, inherited communication models go against research concerned with building meanings and viewpoints that are alternatives to the predominant ones. The new, emerging approaches tend to strengthen bidirectional relationships between communication and social transformation. Resumo A teoria social que vem sendo construída na América Latina nos últimos vinte anos propõe uma alternativa aos critérios tradicionais de demarcação das ciências. Frente à tendência dominante, que tende a subsumir o conhecimento num processo intensivo de mercantilização