Update to Who Says What to Whom? Assessing the Alignment of Content and Audience Between Scholarly and Professional Publications in Technical Communication (1996–2013)

Researcher’s note (June 2026). Erin Friess, Saul Carliner, and I wrote this in 2015 to extend the preliminary study we had presented the year before, scaling the corpus up to 986 articles so we could more confidently map where scholarly and professional technical communication publications cover the same ground and where they part ways. The core idea is simple: what academics and practitioners choose to publish, and for whom, is documentary evidence of their actual interests. I keep returning to this work now as I study AI in writing and assessment, where the same question of audience-content alignment shapes how automated tools are built and judged. This note is a starting draft.

Abstract

Academe-industry relations are an ongoing topic in the conversation on technical communication. Key issues in the conversation include alignment between academic curricula and industry needs, the effectiveness of the preparation provided by academic programs, and the alignment of interests between the two groups. However, no study has attempted to empirically assess the extent of the academic and industry alignment empirically. This paper provides updated results from our ongoing exploration of this issue. It is guided by the following questions: (1) What content areas are covered by both peer-reviewed and trade publications?, (2) What content areas are unique to each type of publication?, and (3) Who is the intended audience of the content? To assess this alignment, we coded for three major content areas in a random sample of 986 articles published between 1996 and 2013 in four leading peer-reviewed journals (IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly) and one publication for practicing technical communicators (Intercom).

Index Terms — Academe-industry relationships, content analysis, peer-reviewed literature, professional literature

Introduction

An ongoing topic of conversation in technical communication is the relationship between academe and industry. Among the aspects of the relationship discussed include design of academic programs and courses to meet the needs of industry (such as [1], [2], and [3]), the effectiveness with which academic programs prepare students for jobs as technical communicators (such as [4]), and the alignment of interests and priorities (or lack thereof) between academe and industry [5].

Although empirical studies have explored opinions about the alignment between industry and academe (such as [4]), no study had attempted to assess empirical evidence of the interests of the two, and assessed the alignment among them. We presented the preliminary results of our assessment at the 2014 IEEE Professional Communication Conference [6]. Specifically, we developed this study around three research questions: What content areas are covered by both research and trade publications? What content areas are unique to each type of publication? Who is the intended audience of the content? Our initial study focused on the alignment of content and audience in 348 scholarly and trade articles on technical communication. This year’s update furthers our exploration in a corpus of 986 articles. After situating this study in the literature, we describe the methodology chosen, present our results, and suggest conclusions.

Literature Review

Within the field of professional and technical communication, the conversation on the relationship between industry and academe extends back as long as the field has existed. In the 1950s, professional technical writers sought to establish academic programs to prepare technical communicators for their careers and initiate scholarly research on which to build a body of literature as a means to shape the field and support claims that technical communication is, indeed, a profession. With the establishment of academic programs at Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1950s, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Minnesota afterwards, and with the continued growth in the number of academic programs in the 1970s and 1980s to feed the need for technical communicators in the high tech industry, other conversations beyond establishing the basic need for technical communication research and education have emerged. One such conversation is the concordance between academic courses and curricula and the needs of industry. This discussion specifically has consisted of experience reports and one-institution studies and has focused on ways to identify core knowledge and skills of the profession (such as [2]) and the use of advisory boards and similar structures to identify industry needs and build partnerships between academe and industry (such as [7]). Another conversation is the effectiveness of academic programs in preparing students for the real world. This discussion has usually involved research with alumni and concludes with self-reported data that academic programs do an especially good job of preparing students for writing and interface design tasks but could better prepare students for interviewing and dealing with difficult situations and people in the workplace (such as [4]). A third conversation is the alignment between academe and industry and, through opinion papers, suggests that an effort could be made to ensure that a strong link exists between the two groups (such as [5]). One characteristic of the literature on this issue is that it primarily consists of opinion or limited scopes of experience and does not include a wide, empirical study of the phenomenon.

Although the conversations on academe-industry relationships are important ones within technical communication, the academe-industry relationship is also an important discussion in most other disciplines. For example, the academe-industry relationship is critical in the field of engineering education, where one of the key topics of conversation is the importance of communications to the engineering curriculum and how to effectively prepare students for the communication tasks they will experience in their future professional jobs.

The conversations are also important in the fields of education and management. In both of those fields, researchers have attempted to empirically explore the extent to which research from academe moves into practice. For example, Lysenko [8] and Carliner et al. [9] have explored the extent to which practicing professionals read the research literature. Both have found that, although practicing professionals have an interest in research, few actually regularly read research publications. Similarly, management researchers Rynes, Colbert, and Brown [10] found that managers were only familiar with about two-thirds of research-validated practices in their field. In their report, they note that many managers believe that graphology (handwriting analysis) is a valid technique for selecting workers. In fact, one of the professional journals serving managers declared it a growth area in the field, when research had actually debunked the effectiveness of graphology.

More than identifying a gulf between professional beliefs and empirically validated practice, management researchers Deadrick and Gibson [11] sought to understand the extent of alignment between researchers and professionals. Because academic journals and professional magazines provide documentary evidence of the interests of their readers, Deadrick and Gibson used an analysis of the topics covered in leading academic journals and professional magazines serving the sub-discipline of Human Resources Management to generate their conclusions. They found that that the two types of publications focused on different topics and concluded that researchers and practicing professionals had different interests.

Methodology

To begin to understand the alignment between academe and industry, we asked these three questions: What content areas are covered by both research and trade publications? What content areas are unique to each type of publication? Who is the intended audience of the content? To answer the research questions, we conducted a similar analysis to Deadrick and Gibson [11]. To choose the major research publications to include in the study, we turned to previous analyses of the peer-review literature in the field including Boettger and Lam [12], Carliner et al. [13], and Lowry et al. [14]. The studies conclude that the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly are the leading journals in technical communication. No corresponding study exists of the professional literature, so we chose to include Intercom, the longest-published magazine. Intercom started as a newsletter in 1953 with the founding of the predecessor organization to its publisher, the Society for Technical Communication. The organization began publishing it as a magazine in January 1996. Because the academic journals publish between 3 and 8 articles in their quarterly issues and Intercom publishes between 4 and 10 articles in its 10 issues each year, we limited the search of professional literature to one magazine for practical purposes.

For this particular analysis, we explored the content in 986 publications, which were randomly selected from a corpus of 3,338 publications. This larger corpus included every feature article and column in Intercom and every peer-reviewed article in the four leading technical communication journals from 1996-2013. The sample we examined here is proportional to the publication distribution in the larger corpus; however, it is not proportional by year so no longitudinal analysis of these content areas can be explored here. However, our sample exceeds the size needed to reflect the population with 95% confidence (±3).

TABLE I. DESCRIPTION OF VARIABLES IN ANALYSIS

Variable	Description
Publication Type	Recorded the publication as either professional (Intercom) or scholarly (JBTC, TC, TCQ, TPC)
Broad Topic	Classified the broad topic of each publication as product, process, profession, or education
Primary Topic	Classified the primary topic of each publication as assessment, collaboration, communication strategies, comprehension, design, editing and style, gender, genre, intercultural communication, knowledge and information management, pedagogy, professionalization, research design, rhetoric, technology, usability and user experience
Primary Audience	Classified the primary audience for each publication as academic, business owner, consultant, editor, general, manager, other, senior writer/content strategist, student, visual communicator, or writer/content developer

Once we identified the sample, we manually coded the 986 publications for four content variables: Publication Type, Broad Topic, Primary Topic, and Primary Audience. Table I provides a description of each variable and its levels. These variables and levels were selected or adapted based on their presence in previous studies developed by Boettger and Lam [12] and Carliner et al [13]. Over multiple norming sessions, we coded approximately 20% of the sample.

We chose to analyze our data through descriptive statistics due to this study’s exploratory nature. Our results begin to suggest the most frequent content areas and targeted audiences in these publications as well as how the professional and scholarly publications might align or differ in these areas.

Results

The first research question examined the content areas in the sample. Overall, we found that 36% of the articles were process-oriented and 34% were product-oriented. These results did not shift in any substantial ways from our original report, which examined a sample of 348 articles. Process articles focused on a part or all of the tasks involved in producing and delivering a product. Product articles focused on a characteristic of some or all of a service or a deliverable. The remaining articles in the sample were either profession-oriented (17%), characterizing some aspect of the identity of a technical communicator, or education-oriented (13%). See Figure 1 for a summary of the results. Again, these results did not change substantially from our original report.

The second research question addressed which content areas were unique to the publication types. These results begin to suggest content differences between the professional and scholarly publications. As illustrated by the stacked column chart in Figure 1, the process-oriented articles were more common to professional publications (n = 200); however these texts were also found frequently in the scholarly publications (n = 158). These new results reflect some changes to our earlier report where the shares of process-oriented articles were distributed almost equally between the two publication types. Further analysis would indicate if this new result is statistically significant. Additionally, product-oriented articles were more common to scholarly publications; however, the frequency of these articles between publication types was not as pronounced as they were in our original report. Finally, profession-oriented articles were almost exclusive to Intercom, and education-oriented articles were more frequent in scholarly publications. These results did not vary substantially from our original report.

[Figure 1: Coverage of the Broad Topics — image to be added.]

When examined by primary topic, articles on professionalization, technology, and editing and style were more frequent to Intercom, and articles focused on pedagogy, assessment, research design, and comprehension were more common to the scholarly publications. Articles on rhetoric were exclusive to the scholarly publications. Our updated results suggest topics like editing and style and pedagogy are found more frequently in one publication type, suggesting additional content differences between professional and scholarly publications in technical communication. See Figure 2 for a summary of coverage of primary topics.

The final research question examined the primary audience for the publications. We classified these potential audiences into 11 discreet categories. Overall, 35% of the sample (n = 349) appeared to target academics, while 23% (n = 226) targeted writers and content developers. See Figure 3 for a summary of primary audiences for the articles. We defined academics as individuals who are instructors or researchers in accredited academic institutions, and writers/content developers as individuals who write and produce technical content on assignment. These results did not vary substantially from our original report.

When examined by publication type, the results show that the scholarly publications primarily targeted academics (n = 322), and Intercom primarily targeted writers and content developers (n = 195). Additionally, Intercom exclusively targeted students (n = 6).

[Figure 2: Coverage of the primary topics — image to be added.]

[Figure 3: Coverage of Primary audience — image to be added.]

Conclusions

This study has empirically analyzed the broad topic, the primary topic, and the intended audiences of approximately 30% of all the articles published in the scholarly and professional publications in technical communication from 1996 to 2013. The aim of this study was to identify content areas that are covered by both research and trade publications, content areas that are unique to each type of publication, and the intended audience of the content. This study has found differences between the two categories of publications. Professional publications tend toward publishing process and professional-oriented articles that focus on professionalization, technology and editing and style and most frequently intended for writers/content developers. Scholarly publications tend toward publishing product- and education-oriented articles that focus on assessment, research design, and comprehension and are most frequently intended for academics. This, in turn, provides insights into the nature of differences in the conversations of practicing professionals and academics.

Future studies could reveal longitudinal changes within the content area and the audiences. Indeed, such an analysis could reveal whether topics appear first in scholarly journals or in professional journals and the intervals between the introductions within each publication type. Ultimately, a full corpus analysis could provide empirical insight into the values and goals of academia and industry.

About the Authors

Ryan K. Boettger is an associate professor in the Department of Technical Communication, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA. His research areas include curriculum development and assessment, STEM education, technical editing, and grant writing. He is the co-creator of TechCorp, a soon-to-be publicly released corpus of student technical writing.

Erin Friess is an associate professor in the Department of Technical Communication, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA. Her research areas include decision-making communication, workplace communication, discourse analysis, and usability and user experience practice.

Saul Carliner is an associate professor and Provost’s Fellow for Digital Learning at Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada. He is the Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, board member and chair of the Certification Steering Committee for the Canadian Society for Training and Development, board member of the STC Certification Commission, and a Fellow and past president of the Society for Technical Communication.

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