Deception as Process and Content: Mapping Research on Deception Published in SJR’s Top-Ranked Communication Studies Journals

This paper reviews the recent literature in the field of communication sciences in terms of analyzing the research on deception, misinformation, and information misuse. A scoping review of the literature presented here focuses on deception studies published in top SJR journals in the years 2020–2022. Two research approaches can be distinguished in this field: analyzing the process or analyzing the content. For the most part, researchers analyze deception from the perspective of the communication process, there are far fewer studies on the content of deceptive messages. Original papers comprise the majority of studies on deception in the communications field, and, among them, dominate the research on social media. In recent years, research on instant messaging services such as WhatsApp has been increasingly popular, but there has been a lack of studies on Telegram, which is growing in importance for communication processes. This work contributes to the literature on deception by introducing a novel literature sampling method and investigating two dimensions of deception analysis, of which one is far more represented in communication studies.