A Bibliometric Analysis of Public Relations Research

From time to time, scholars in an academic or professional discipline need to assess the quality and stature of their field. Studies of citation patterns in journals—of who cites whom and of the nature of the citations—offer a method for taking stock of a discipline. This article reports the results of the first citation study of public relations. The results show that public relations has matured greatly as a discipline over the 15-year period studied. In articles published early in the period, most citations were to other fields, especially to the social sciences. In more recent articles, public relations scholars cite each other more often—showing that the discipline is coalescing around its own body of knowledge. We conclude that public relations developed a literature that is not only voluminous but also relevant during this period. The study also shows that public relations has become a scholarly discipline as well as a professional one. There was a dramatic increase in the relative number of educator-authors, and a relative decrease in the number of practitioners, contributing to the scholarly public relations literature over the 15-year period examined in this study.