Topic modeling the research-practice gap in public relations 2011-2020

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Abstract

Prior empirical efforts in uncovering the research-practice gap in public relations have often been restricted to perceptions and evaluations of people participating in the investigation. Moving beyond the linear perspective on knowledge transfer that dominates relevant discussions for decades, this study adopted topic modeling as an inductive analytical approach to examine a comprehensive set of texts representing the perspective of scholars and practitioners over a 10-year period from 2011 to 2020. A comparison of 35 topics discerned from academic journals (1,209 titles/abstracts) and professional texts (2,378 articles) revealed that a total of 18 topics were peculiar to each corpus, providing sound evidence of the substantial divide between scholars and practitioners. However, two communities shared common or comparable concerns over 17 topics, suggesting a significant convergence on crucial issues. Moreover, scholars and practitioners assigned varying weights to these topics in their publications, which indicated noteworthy differences in the primary areas of interest for both communities. In addition to deepening our understanding of the width and nuances of the research-practice gap in the field of public relations in a quantitative way, findings obtained from this study also signal the direction toward which scholars and practitioners should make progress to bridge the gap.

Keywords

knowledge community, practitioner, public relations, research-practice gap, scholar, topic model