Bibliographical Exploration of Public Relations and Diplomacy: Public, Organisational, and Civil Society Perspectives

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 diplo¬macy, from a European perspective. A mixed methods approach of quantita¬tive 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 di¬rect 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 re¬search 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 diplo¬macy at the intersection of public relations and diplomacy, albeit from a debatable European perspective. The research is relevant to any scholar or practitioner in¬terested 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 explo¬ration 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.