Research Guides: Communication: Home

VT School of Communication and the University Library

Communication, a part of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, teaches students about many facets of communication including advertising, communication skills and strategies, multimedia journalism, sports media and analytics, and more.

Per their webpage:, the school's mission is to "develop and enhance understanding of communication processes and their effects on individuals, organizations, culture, and society. The school meets its mission through discovery, learning, and engagement focused on creation, distribution, and interpretation of messages through media systems. We create and share knowledge about the interaction of messages and media within historical, economic, technological, and cultural environments."

This guide provides a collection of recommended resources for Communication research such as databases, journals, books, articles, and so on. The recommendations are not comprehensive, but these resources are very likely to contain materials useful for your projects.

A few recommended online resources outside Virginia Tech

American Rhetoric
Database of and index to 5000+ full text, audio, and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two.
international institute of Communications
The policy platform for the digital ecosystem
The IIC exists to inform and thereby shape the global policy agenda for the ICT and digital ecosystem.
National Communication Association
"Advancing Communication scholarship, teaching, and practice to foster a better world." A prominent organization offering academic journals such as Communication Monographs and Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Pew Research Center
Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. We conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. They do not take policy positions.

Roper Center Public Opinion Archives (with iPOLL)
The Roper Center indexes questions and response data from public opinion polls and academic surveys. Polls are available in HTML and PDF; data sets can be downloaded as text or SPSS files. Many results can be viewed as interactive cross tabulations. You must create a profile and sign in to download data sets. 1930s-present.

Stanford Political Communication Lab research
A selection of the latest communication research from Stanford.