The Scholarship of Public Diplomacy: Analysis of a Growing Field

Abstract

Public diplomacy is a fast-growing area of study with little agreement on its boundaries. In support of the subject’s development as a field of academic inquiry, we present a content analysis of English-language peer-reviewed articles on public diplomacy since 1965 (N = 2,124). We begin with analysis of bibliographic data to establish the field’s institutional boundaries by highlighting trends in scholarship over time and identifying prominent disciplines and journals. We then sketch the field’s conceptual boundaries by analyzing the concepts and topics that appear most in the literature. This process allows us to characterize decades of scholarship on public diplomacy and offer recommendations for future work.