It was established in 1949 as the Central States Speech Journal, obtaining its current title in 1989.

The editor-in-chief is Yuping Mao (California State University, Long Beach).

It is published in 6 issues a year by Routledge and is an official journal of the Central States Communication Association.

[1] According to data published in Scientometrics Communication Studies was rated as the fifth-most central journal to the field of human communication.

[2] The journal is abstracted and indexed in EBSCO databases, Emerging Sources Citation Index,[3] ProQuest databases, and Scopus.