Editorial

Before we introduce the articles collected in this issue, we want to reflect on practices and publication patterns of the last six years. We thereby take up ongoing debates in our field on gender diversity and inequalities in the representation of women in science (Wang et al., 2021). While female authors were strongly underrepresented in journal publications for several decades (Brosius & Haas, 2009), journals in communication and media research recently have seen a trend towards closing the gender gap, with some now showing an equal distribution of female and male authors (Beck, Domahidi, Eilders, Engelmann, & Pentzold, 2023, pp. 2, 5; Trepte & Loths, 2020). The Swiss Association of Communication and Media Research (SACM), and with it SComS, appreciates and supports the recently founded “Working Group Publication Diversity”, led by Sabine Trepte and Michael Scharkow (2023). We contribute to this discussion by reporting the distribution of male and female authorship in all SComS publications from 2017 to 2022, i. e., all available issues since SComS is published open access (Table 1)