Rhetoric, Public and Academic Communication
Anca Anton
University of Bucharest, Romania
E-mail: anca.anton@fjsc.ro
Anne-Marie Cotton
Artevelde University of Applied Sciences, Belgium
E-mail: am.cotton@arteveldehs.be
Eugen Glavan
Research Institute for the Quality of Life, Romanian Academy, Romania
E-mail: eugen@iccv.ro
Abstract: This paper aims to describe, infer and interpret the corpus of references extracted from the book “Diplomacy, Organisations and Citizens. A European Communication Perspective” (Sebastião & Spínola, 2022), a collective volume published as an output of a three-year research and educational project exploring the intersection of public relations with public, organisational and civil society diplomacy, from a European perspective. A mixed methods approach of quantitative and statistical techniques in conjunction with social network analysis (SNA) was applied to a corpus formed out of 785 unique entries corresponding to the book references. Borrowing from bibliometric approaches, the techniques of direct citation networks, co-citation networks, and topic networks were used to map perspectives used in the book. Results point to a clear linguistic preference for English, to a saliency of journal articles overlapping with the increase in research accessibility through digitalisation, to a clear dominance of a few journals coming from the fields of public relations and public diplomacy, and to a clear alignment of the perspectives on public, organisational and civil society diplomacy at the intersection of public relations and diplomacy, albeit from a debatable European perspective. The research is relevant to any scholar or practitioner interested in how public relations and the democratised forms of diplomacy intersect and influence each other. It can also serve as a roadmap to how the exploration of the bibliographical universe of a research project can be used as a self-reflection and evaluation tool.
Keywords: public relations, public diplomacy, organisational diplomacy, civil society diplomacy, bibliography, social network analysis.
Rhetoric and Communications Journal, issue 61, October 2024