According to an analysis carried out by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the CEU Abat Oliba University, Spain leads the world in research on the relationship between AI and journalism. Most academic studies treat AI as a promising innovation, and pay little attention to its impact on the environment and the Global South, among other existing gaps.
Spain is leading the research on artificial intelligence (AI) and journalism, according to an analysis of studies on this topic published around the world in the five-year period between 2020 and 2024. A quarter of academic articles are authored by researchers in Spain, a leadership that has been maintained throughout the entire period.
This was discovered by researchers from the Communication and Education Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the CEU Abat Oliba University after analysing more than 200 academic articles published in English on AI and journalism in this five-year period. The research has just been published in the journal Review of Communication Research.
A systematic review of these articles has found that the study of the relationship between AI and journalism has major gaps. Communication research has barely addressed some of the most pressing issues, such as the environmental impact of AI, its deployment in the Global South, interference with journalistic judgment, the effectiveness of ethical codes and self-regulation, and the perception of the use of AI by journalism audiences. The authors encourage the research community to move towards a research agenda that prioritises these issues.
The study is part of the IA-COM project (Artificial intelligence for the promotion of quality journalism and media literacy: Applied technological advances and challenges in the era of disinformation), funded by the Spanish Research Agency.
Exponential growth
Academic interest in the relationship between AI and journalism has skyrocketed in the period analysed. In 2020, 13 articles on the topic were published, while in 2024 there were 102 (half of the five-year total, 203).
Most research is conducted from Europe and on European case studies. In contrast, the Global South contains scarce production and receives little attention (as shown in Figure 1). More than half of the articles (106) focused on Europe, and very few analysed the situation in the Middle East (20), Latin America (17), or sub-Saharan Africa (10).
"Finding Spain leading this area of research was an unexpected discovery", says Michele Catanzaro, lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Communication Studies at the UAB and co-author of the work. The number of Spanish publications (26% of the total) is almost double that of the next country, the United States, and almost triple that of the third, China. Among the ten most productive countries, six are European.
Research homework
A large proportion of the studies (39%) were published in journals belonging to the highest impact quartile. However, the research is far from addressing the issue in its entirety.
"Many articles present AI exclusively as a promising innovation and journalism as a sector that can do nothing but accept it, without questioning its cultural, political and epistemological implications", observes Laura Cervi, co-author of the work and lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Communication Studies at the UAB.
Much of the research is influenced by a technological determinism that avoids fundamental debates, such as the interference of algorithms in journalistic judgment. Although studies address ethical issues (especially related to AI biases), there is no monitoring of the actual effectiveness of ethical codes and self-regulations. Likewise, there is very limited research on audience perceptions of the use of AI in journalism. The impact of AI on journalism in the Global South and environmental aspects are other issues that have hardly been investigated.
"The analysis of the gaps in current research sets an agenda for future research, with the aim of AI being at the service of journalism and not the other way around", concludes Santiago Tejedor, co-author of the work and director of the UAB's Communication and Education Office.
The Communication and Education Office
The Communication and Education Office is a consolidated group specialised in scientific research and dissemination linked to the Department of Journalism and Communication Studies of the UAB. It is recognised by the Catalan government's AGAUR (Agency for the Management of University and Research Grants) as a Consolidated Research Group for its trajectory, projection and development, and carries out projects and research in the field of convergence between communication and education. Since its creation, it has implemented initiatives aimed at integrating, with awareness and freedom, communication technologies in the so-called global or knowledge society.
Reference:
Cervi, L., Catanzaro, M., Jiménez Jacinto, J.F., & Tejedor, S. (2026). Deconstructing the hype: A critical literature review on AI in journalism. Review of Communication Research,14,32-53. https://doi.org/10.52152/RCR.V14.3
Project:
The project "La inteligencia artificial para el fomento del periodismo de calidad y la alfabetización mediática: Avances tecnológicos aplicados y desafíos en la era de la desinformación" (reference PID2023-149759OB-I00) is an initiative derived from the 2023 call for Knowledge Generation Projects and actions for the training of pre-doctoral research personnel associated with these projects, within the framework of the Spanish Programme to Promote Scientific and Technical Research and its Transfer, of the Spanish Plan for Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research 2021-2023.
