1. Introduction
[1.1] Fan studies is commonly seen as an interdisciplinary field of research given that it offers a "discipline-specific but fan-related output of many academics from many disciplines" (Turk 2018, 540). Several scholars have argued that fan studies, particularly in the digital age, needs to not only build bridges to better understand how the field is evolving overall (Kelley et al. 2019) but also harness the methodological toolbox of other disciplines in which certain methodological approaches are more common.
[1.2] However, before making a call for action for more methodological and theoretical interdisciplinarity it is necessary to know more about the dominant methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks in the domain of fan studies. Recent work has helped to elucidate methods within the fan studies field (e.g., see Largent, Popova, and Vist 2020), but the focus of our discussion is different. We are interested in offering an empirical basis for understanding to what extent the discipline of fan studies can dialogue with other fields of research.
[1.3] Even if there is a consensus that fan studies is a field with permeable boundaries, open to researchers from different yet interrelated disciplines such as cultural studies, communication sciences, library sciences, media or journalism studies, English, or even linguistics, the discipline's lack of visibility and the citational elisions (Largent, Popova, and Vist 2020) point toward issues not in how we do fan studies but rather in how we present the research. As Adrienne Evans and Mafalda Stasi (2014) have noted, there is a reluctance to openly talk about methodology in fan studies. Paradoxically, this goes hand in hand with a wide variety of methods that include quantitative, qualitative, archival, legal, textual, and community-centered methods with more or less rigor, which poses a challenge when it comes to questions of compatibility and interdisciplinarity.
[1.4] Our main research question is this: How is interdisciplinarity in theory and methods reflected in the academic publications found in two relevant journals in the field of fan studies? We will focus specifically on the established and emerging theories, methodologies, and perspectives mentioned or referred to in articles studying the field of fandom. By comparing what is made explicit in terms of methods and theories and what instead remains implicit, we can understand whether there is unused potential for interdisciplinarity in the field.
[1.5] Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) and the Journal of Fandom Studies (JFS), two internationally acknowledged journals dedicated to fan studies, describe themselves as addressing "key issues in fan studies itself, while also fostering new areas of enquiry that take us beyond the bounds of current scholarship" (Journal of Fandom Studies Editors 2012) and encouraging "a variety of critical approaches" (Transformative Works and Cultures Editors n.d.), respectively. We performed a metadata analysis of the keywords of all articles published in these two journals from 2012 until early 2021. As a follow-up, we carried out an inductive content analysis of fifty randomly selected abstracts to investigate the dominant disciplinary perspectives, theoretical approaches, and methods used in the published articles. Additionally, we compared these findings with those of another interdisciplinary field, journalism studies (Steensen and Ahva 2015), to see whether and how our results differed. The two investigations followed the same method to allow a comparison of the findings.
2. Brief considerations on the interdisciplinarity of fan studies
[2.1] As stated by Tisha Turk, "interdisciplinarity of fan studies is often assumed without comment by scholars in the field" (2018, 539). As a consequence, interdisciplinarity in the case of fan studies is often an undiscussed umbrella term for research carried out by "scholars in disciplines ranging from cultural studies to law, from sociology to library science, all bringing their unique perspectives to bear on research about fans" (Largent, Popova, and Vist 2017). Only occasionally do scholars in the field offer more detailed definitions of the term. Sam Ford, for instance, has stated that "the strength of fan studies and its rich body of research stems in part from the interdisciplinarity that has allowed scholars from varied fields to bring their research methods and theoretical constructs to bear on the relationships active audiences have with and around media texts" (2014, 53f). However, interdisciplinarity requires more than just embedding established methods and theories from other disciplines in the field of fan studies. Erika Wang and colleagues (2020) mention, grounded in a discussion at the Fan Studies Network Conference 2018 in Cardiff, that "interdisciplinarity requires dialogue—a reflexive process of deep and active listening, reflective response, and progress toward synthesis of ideas." The absorption of new methods, theories, and ideas requires time, even if one considers fan studies to be a "liminal disciplinary space, between and among other disciplines but also transcending them to create something new" (Jacobs 2020).
[2.2] Interdisciplinarity is therefore a long-term process that goes well beyond the juxtaposition of distinct perspectives on an issue—which denotes a multidisciplinary approach—and implies the combination "of insights and perspectives from more than one conventional discipline to the understanding of social phenomena" (Miller 2017, §4). Additionally, fan studies is still a relatively new field of research: the earliest anglophone contribution was published in 1975 (Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston 1975), and a cluster of academic publications in 1992 are considered cornerstones of the field (Bacon-Smith 1992; Fiske 1992; Jenkins 1992; Lewis 1992; Penley 1992). Raising the "awareness of the breadth of methodological approaches available, and a willingness to look across to work originating in what could be traditionally considered a different discipline, to capitalize on the available fan studies knowledge base" (Jacobs 2020, ¶7.1) requires considerable resources in terms of time, energy, and eagerness to confront previously unknown methods. This means not only becoming acquainted, for instance, with computational methods (Black 2020) but also taking into account the possible blind spots of methodological practices (Pande 2020).
[2.3] Interdisciplinarity thus involves the interaction, combination, and integration of theories, concepts, and methods across different disciplines. Hence, we want to shed light on the question of interdisciplinarity by investigating contemporary notions of theory and methods and their use in two main discipline-related scholarly journals.
3. Methods
[3.1] To answer our main question, we conducted a two-step analysis: first, we carried out a metadata analysis of the keywords of all the articles published between 2008 and early 2021. We analyzed volumes 1–35 for TWC and volumes 1–7 for the JFS until early 2021. To carry out the metadata analysis we scraped the keywords from the archives of the two journals. The scraping was done with the help of the scraping tool from ParseHub (https://www.parsehub.com/). In the case of TWC, this was relatively easy due to the open-access policy of the journal. In the case of JFS, access had to be established manually through the City, University of London, library before getting access to the articles on the EBSCO platform on which scraping was possible. This procedure had to be done for every article individually. Once the keywords were scraped and the stop words eliminated, we performed a descriptive analysis of the corpus, highlighting the twenty most frequently used keywords in each archive as well as the most often used theoretical and methodological keywords on the two websites.
[3.2] In a second step, we analyzed fifty randomly selected abstracts (twenty-five from each journal) to investigate the dominant disciplinary perspective as well as the theoretical approach and method(s) used in the published articles. The abstracts were then analyzed through a qualitative inductive content analysis (Mayring 2000). The two main criteria for the inclusion of the textual material to be analyzed were (1) established theories in the social sciences and (2) established methods in the social sciences. The abstracts are scrutinized following these two defining criteria to identify the main categories. In cases of uncertainty about whether to include either theories or methods, we consulted theoretical (Merskin 2020; Turner 2018) or methodological (e.g., Lewis-Beck, Bryman, and Liao 2004; Guthrie 2010; Allen 2017) reference works. For all statistical analyses we used Microsoft Excel.
4. Discussion and conclusion
[4.1] We identified 1,093 keywords in 300 articles (136 articles in JFS and 164 in TWC). The metadata analysis showed that, in general, the most often used keywords to describe the content of the published articles are media, fans, social, persons, and fiction (figure 1).
Figure 1. Occurrences of the twenty most frequent keywords.
[4.2] Our results also showed that, among all the keywords, only 124 were related to theories, and only forty were linked to methods. In general, the keywords connected to theories tended to be very specific or deeply connected to topics rooted in the field of fan studies rather than related to overarching theories that could offer a certain connectedness to other fields (figure 2). That was the case for keywords related to gender theory, where we often found keywords such as feminism, masculinity, queer theory, or even more general ones such as identity theory and cultural theories all referring to the same theoretical field. Overall, we can observe a long tail of theories being used in fan studies.
Figure 2. Occurrences of the twenty most frequent theory-related keywords.
[4.3] A similar pattern can be observed in the content analysis of the abstracts: grounded theory (twenty-five mentions) is clearly dominating as a theoretical approach, followed by gender theory (six mentions); all other approaches are mentioned just once or twice. Although grounded theory is a perfectly legitimate approach, it is difficult to establish links to other disciplines' theoretical frameworks given that the theoretical corpus has to be built first. It is therefore not surprising that among the twenty most often mentioned theories only three—gender, ethics, and public sphere—are shared with journalism studies (see Steensen and Ahva 2015, 8). The use of highly specific approaches and the dominance of grounded theory risk limiting the "liminal disciplinary space"—it becomes difficult to make new connections with scholars from other fields such as journalism studies who might use more recognizable keywords to establish relations beyond the boundaries of their own field of research. In addition, the keywords chosen by the authors generally obfuscate the variety of theoretical approaches actually employed in the studies. In other words, the keywords do not reflect the complexity of the studies' theoretical frameworks.
[4.4] When it comes to keywords related to methods, authors tend to use general descriptors such as "methodology" or "analysis," which do not immediately offer a clear understanding of the methods used (figure 3). Sometimes the keywords instead reflect a variety of methods, ranging from modal analysis to content analysis, to historic and archive research, to the most often used method: ethnography. What becomes clear is that fan studies tends to use qualitative methods rather than quantitative ones, and computational methods are scarce.
Figure 3. Occurrences of the twenty most frequent specific method-related keywords.
[4.5] The content analysis of the abstracts in terms of the methods used shows that abstracts often lack any reference to a research method, even if a specific methodology was employed in the article. In seventeen cases no specific method was indicated; in the other twelve, just the expression "case study" was used with no further explanation (figure 4).
Figure 4. Methods specifically mentioned in the abstracts.
[4.6] Additionally, the abstracts also allow us to understand the dominant perspectives used in fan studies' papers: most published articles adopt either a sociological (38 percent) or a cultural studies (34 percent) perspective. Language and economy (both 12 percent) or technology and historic perspectives (both 2 percent) are adopted far less. This is interesting because it is in line with the dominant perspectives in journalism studies, which reveals both disciplines' hybrid academic culture.
[4.7] Based on these findings we offer two suggestions to improve fan studies' visibility and interdisciplinarity in terms of its ability to connect with other fields of research. First, keywords are essential for visibility (Hartley and Kostoff 2003) and consequently for interdisciplinarity. Clarifying methods and theories in keywords and using precise terminology increase the odds of publications being discovered by scholars beyond the boundaries of fan studies. Fan studies scholars traditionally understand the importance of accurate tagging in fan fiction archives for readability and connectivity—this understanding should be harnessed for scientific papers as well.
[4.8] In addition, abstracts are essential to increase readership. If the abstracts lack relevant information about methods and theories and thus convey a biased picture, the risk of not being read grows. Writing more structured abstracts—that is, including some background information, a specific description of the method, theory, and results, and adding a brief conclusion—increases the potential readership.
[4.9] However, authors may not always have total control over keywords and abstracts due to journal restrictions or editorial suggestions. We believe that it is important for journal editors and production teams not only to allow but also to encourage fan scholars to exploit the full potential of a strategic use of these tools to maximize the interdisciplinary potential.
5. Acknowledgments
[5.1] The authors would like to thank Ludi Price and Lynn Robinson, the organizers of the FanLIS 2021 symposium at City, University of London, for making this contribution possible. We would also like to thank the attendees of the symposium for the constructive feedback to our presentation, which we elaborated on in this article.