Abstract:

The aim of the study is to reveal the trends in the field of public relations by examining the topic of ‘public relations models’ in order to capture the variation in public relations practice. Bibliometric analysis has been chosen as the methodology in this study to show publishing patterns as it finds out the stream of knowledge and the development of literature in a specific discipline. Data used in this research were collected from Thomson Reuters Web of Science Database. By selecting the topic of ‘public relations model’ in the search button, 595 studies were investigated within the context of institution and country collaboration, co-citation network analysis, co-word network analysis and citation burst. In order to perform these network analyses, the CiteSpace II software package has been used. The findings suggest that the USA as a country, universities in the USA as institutions and academics from the USA as author collaboration are found to be the top ranked items by centrality on the topic of public relations models. Grunig and Grunig’s (2002) paper on public relations and communication models is found to have the strongest citation burst as expected. The most investigated research topics are global flux, the blog-mediated crisis communication model, and stakeholder relationship.

Keywords: