The Past, Present, and Future of Internal Communication in Public Relations: A Computational Review of the Emerging Literature

ABSTRACT

Utilizing a full-text 15,926,460-word database of all peer-reviewed articles published in six public relations journals between 2012 and 2022 (N = 2,675), we employ a variety of computational methods to investigate the past, present, and future of internal communication in public relations. We first situate internal communication studies in the wider public relations literature, document its growth, identify a set of “internal-communication papers” (N = 407), and conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis. Next, we investigate the theoretical, empirical, and epistemological origins of internal communication by analyzing all identified internal communication papers’ reference lists and providing core readings for the research community. Finally, we compare internal communication papers with non-internal-communication counterparts, quantify literature gaps, and illuminate promising research directions to guide the future of internal communication studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Bibliometric analysis
• computational methods
• internal communication
• public relations
• text mining

Acknowledgments

We thank Yiwei Xu for the institutional data access to the Journal of Communication Management. Replication materials associated with the analyses have been deposited onto Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/37ZEQ.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726X.2024.2329543.

Notes

1. N refers to the number of articles; n refers to the number of words written by scholars.