This study employs content analysis and social network analysis to measure scholarship hybridity in the journalism scholarships of three BRICS nations and further to discuss the processes of de-Westernization in Global South. All journalism articles in three national academic journals of Brazil, China, and South Africa from 2009 to 2018 were sampled and 4093 citations were coded and analyzed. Two concepts, degree centrality and closeness centrality, were tentatively borrowed from social network analysis to measure scholarship hybridity and four types of scholarship hybridity were then proposed and discussed.
The study identifies that journalism scholarships in the three nations bear significant differences in the type of hybridity between local knowledge and Western scholarships, indicating the phenomenon of linguistic segregation and the U.S.-centered production model in journalism field. The research also finds that journalism scholarships of the three nations were severely isolated from each other, and also isolated from other nations in Global South. Inter-regional citation was discussed and suggested as a potential way to drive knowledge production more globally.