SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Res. Metr. Anal.
Sec. Research Assessment
Digging in or building bridges? A scoping review of thematic analysis in communications research
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Münster, Münster, Germany
- 2Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract. This scoping review deals with a major trend in qualitative data analysis: thematic analysis (TA) that provides a general framework to develop relatively transparent processes and thus mitigate long-standing concerns with allegedly subjective aspects of qualitative research. The article examines articles published in the top-ranked 65 academic journals classified by the Scimago Journal and Country Rank as communication journals (n = 342). It illustrates that TA has quickly become more popular over recent years, complementing longer established qualitative methods. The analysis also reveals that TA is a flexible tool that has been successfully applied to make sense of a wide array of qualitative data. Building up on these findings, we deduce practical advice for researchers applying TA and make suggestions on how to improve on current TA practices by, first, documenting common features of successful TA articles (best practice), and, second, identifying apparent superficialities and untapped potentials.
Keywords: qualitative methods, Thematic analysis, Scoping review, Communication, bibliometric analysis
Received: 28 Apr 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Herzog, Handke and Hitters. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Erik Hitters, hitters@eshcc.eur.nl
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.