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This research utilizes computational methods to examine crisis communication scholarship from 2010 to 2020 in two studies with a census of all articles in Public Relations Review and the Journal of Public Relations Research (n = 1293 articles, 7400,685 words). Results indicate crisis scholarship has expanded beyond its prior focus on reputation repair. Situational crisis communication theory and image repair are compared in volume of scholarship and methodological affinity. Social media, SCCT, and media relations are identified as central topics within crisis communication scholarship. • Two studies examine the crisis paradigm in public relations using all text in two SSCI journals from 2010 to 2020. • Crisis scholarship has broadened to include non-reputation topics following the path set forth by Liu and Fraustino (2014). • Reputation research using situational crisis communication theory has grown significantly and remains largely quantitative. • Research using image repair theory is declining as a percentage of crisis scholarship and remains predominantly rhetorical. • Social media, SCCT, and media relations are identified as central topics within crisis communication scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project addresses the evolution of public relations research over the past decade by examining its two SSCI-indexed journals with methods that can reveal the influence of multiple categories of research clusters. Modeling the full text of all 1,293 published articles in Public Relations Review (PRR) and the Journal of Public Relations Research (JPRR) from 2010 to 2020 (7,400,685 words), we identified nine non-discrete clusters in public relations research. Using three computational methods – structural topic modeling, inter-cluster network analysis, and network simulation – we found that (1) the strategic management cluster emerged as the most central for the past decade, followed by public relations professionalism, digital media, crisis communication, internal communication, global public relations, rhetoric and philosophy, media relations, and critical studies, ranked by their proportions in the scholarship; (2) JPRR had greater emphasis on the strategic management cluster relative to PRR, which offered a more diverse representation; (3) little longitudinal change occurred throughout the decade, although internal communication gained traction and public relations professionalism and media relations lost ground as the decade progressed; and 4) the last ten years of public relations research did not see intersection among theoretical traditions from different clusters as much as expected, leaving opportunity for more inter-cluster knowledge production. Theoretical and practical implications for the public relations research community are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]