The annual International Communication Association Meeting was held in Boston, MA last week (May 21-26).  ICA is an important venue for faculty and graduate students in communication and media-related disciplines present their latest research.  Our college always has a strong showing at ICA, and this year was no exception, as reported in Dean Whitten's blog entry last week.  

TISM was well-represented on the program, with thirteen faculty and eighteen graduate students listed as authors of research presented at the conference.   Faculty with papers accepted at the conference include Johannes Bauer, Frank Biocca (who submitted his paper while still on the faculty in TISM), Corey Bohil, Constantinos Coursaris, Kurt DeMaagd, Nicole Ellison, Andrew Fiore, Cliff Lampe, Robert LaRose, Jonathan Obar, Wei Peng, Charles Steinfield, and Joseph Walther.  Graduate students listed on papers at the conference included Brandon Brooks, Caleb Carr, Han Ei Chew, Julia Crouse, Rebecca Gray, Jaehyok Hong, Steve Jeong, Yumi Jung, Carolyn Laplante, Yu-Hao Lee, Jih-hsuan Lin, Wenjuan Ma, Jieun Sung, Alcides Velasquez, Jessica Vitak, Christina Wirth, Yvette Wohn, and Elif Ozkaya Yilmaz.  Special recognition goes to Bob LaRose, who appeared as an author on six papers, and Jessica Vitak, who was an author on five papers that were presented at the conference!  

in addition to quantity, several TISM faculty and graduate students received awards for the quality of their work:

• Bob LaRose received an award for the best recent publication in the field for his paper in Communication Theory, "The Problem of Media Habits."
• "Public Broadband Investment Priorities in the United States: An Analysis of the Broadband Telecommunications Opportunity Program" by LaRose, Bauer, DeMaagd, Chew, Ma, and Jung, received a top 5 paper award in the Communication Law and Policy Division.
• "Good Games=Good Learning? Examining Message Structure and Learning Through Content Analysis" by Yu-Hao Lee, received a top 5 paper award in the Instructional and Developmental Communication Division.

We also learned from a report by Wiley-Blackwell, the publisher of the online and highly respected Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, that papers by TISM faculty were the most heavily accessed of all JCMC papers in 2010.  In their Publisher's Report to the ICA, they listed the ten most accessed papers from JCMC in 2010.  "The Benefits of Facebook Friends: Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites" by TISM's own Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe, which appeared in 2007 in JCMC was the most accessed paper in 2010  with 41,898 accesses!  In the number 2 slot was Nicole Ellison's 2007 paper with danah doyd, "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship" with 32,321 accesses.  

To show how popular the TISM papers were, the 3rd ranked paper had less than a quarter of the Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe paper with 9,701 accesses.  Indeed, the top two TISM papers had more total accesses than the rest of the top ten combined.

It is also worth mentioning that the 4th ranked paper had a TISM and MSU Communication Dept. connection:  "Too Much of a Good Thing? The Relationship Between Number of Friends and Interpersonal Impressions on Facebook" by Tong, Van Der Heide, Langwell and Walther.  This appeared in 2008 and had 9,172 accesses.  And Nicole Ellison appeared for a third time on the top ten list, as her paper, "Managing Impressions Online: Self-Presentation Processes in the Online Dating Environment" (Ellison, Heino, and Gibbs, 2006). was 8th with 4,649 accesses.  All in all, TISM authors factored into more than 70% of the accesses to the ten most accessed articles in JCMC in 2010 - strong evidence that our researchers are leaders in their field!