In this study¹, we start from the premise that nowadays we are confronted to several uncertainties of communication as academic discipline, amongst which the most evident are: the uncertainty related to the denomination or title of the discipline, the uncertainty concerning its status as theory of communication or as science of communication and the uncertainty regarding the inclusion of communication within one or other of the following domains: social sciences, natural sciences or humanities. Using the comparative citation analysis on a corpus of study constituted by thirty titles of publications representative for the domain of science of information and communication (published in the last fifteen years) in two different cultural and scientific areas (English-American and Francophone), we will examine the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citation of these publications in six electronic specialist bookshops. We will also proceed to a comparative statistical analysis of the categories and scientific domains in which these publications and their topics are included on the virtual platforms so as to reveal the above mentioned uncertainties and to find a solution by proposing a model for the standardization of domain categories and tags of the same title on several bookshop sites.

Keywords: Communication, Uncertainties, Comparative citation analysis, Virtual environment.