Noting that Korean mass media began to appear about a century ago, this paper gives a brief history of major Korean academic institutions that contributed to early communication studies. It also introduces exemplary studies done in 13 fields to aid in understanding state-of-the-art paradigms of communications research in the Republic of Korea (South Korea). The paper discusses three paradigmatic trends in Korean communications research: (1) that communications research is devoted to introducing Western (especially American) perspectives on communications; (2) that communications researchers accept and use without any suspicion in the Korean context American communications-related concepts like socialization, delinquency, displacement, mass culture, image, and libel, exactly the same way as American researchers treat them in research; and (3) that communications research is mainly descriptive, not explanatory, not only in historical studies but also in empirical studies using content analyses or survey methods. A five-page list of references concludes the paper. (HOD)