Tracking public relations scholarship trends

Public Relations Review 40 (2014) 116–118

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Public Relations Review

Research in Brief

Tracking public relations scholarship trends: Using semantic

network analysis on PR Journals from 1975 to 2011

Soo-Yeon Kima,1, Myung-Il Choi b, Bryan H. Reber c,2, Daewook Kimd,∗

a School of Communication, Sogang University, Sinsu-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul 121-742, South Korea b Department of Advertising and Public Relations, Namseoul University, 91 Daehak-ro, Seonghwan-eup, Sebuk-gu, Cheonan-si,

Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea c Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Department of Advertising and Public Relations, University of Georgia, Athens,

GA 30602-3018, United States d Department of Public Relations, College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 4 April 2013

Received in revised form 1 September 2013

Accepted 18 November 2013

Keywords:

Semantic network analysis

Public relations scholarship

PR journals

Keywords

a b s t r a c t

A semantic network analysis of keywords in titles of studies published in Public Relations

Review and the Journal of Public Relations Research was conducted to determine the salient

keywords in public relations scholarship from 1975 to 2011. “Communication,” “PR,” “pub￾lic,” “practitioner,” and “corporation” have been the most prominent keywords, and the

associationof “PR-practitioner” was themost salient keywordassociationinpublic relations

scholarship consistently.

© 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Public Relations Review (PRR) and the Journal of Public Relations Research (JPRR) are widely regarded as the most

representative journals in public relations. There have been numerous efforts to examine public relations scholarship by

content and bibliometric analysis of published studies examining it as an aggregate of all studies in these two leading journals

(e.g., Sallot, Lyon, Acosta-Alzuru, & Jones, 2003). However, there have been few efforts to review the articles in these two

journals separately to find their distinctive characteristics and to examine public relations scholarship using methods beyond

content analysis. This study applied semantic network analysis to explore the intellectual development in public relations

by discovering salient keywords with no predetermined criteria.

2. Method

Semantic network analysis is a research paradigm that uses “network analytic techniques on paired associations based on

shared meaning” (Doerfel, 1998, p. 16), and focuses on associations between words. Following a study by Doerfel and Barnett

(1999) that applied semantic network analysis to review titles of articles to find the structure of an academic discipline, the

unit of analysis for this study was all of the words in the titles of articles published in PRR from the journal’s inception,

1975–2011 and in JPRR from the journal’s inception, 1989–2011.

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 352 870 4940.

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S.-Y. Kim), [email protected] (M.-I. Choi), [email protected] (B.H. Reber), [email protected] (D. Kim).

1 Tel.: +82 2 705 7894.

2 Tel.: +1 706 542 3178.

0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2013.11.017