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The paper aims to analyze the contribution of young academics to the field of public relations (PR) and shows which authors exert most influence on them. The study thereby contributes to the assessment of the state of the art of theory building in the field. The authors analyzed the study data against the background of two approaches on progress in the field: Nothhaft et al.’s (2018) idea of strategic communication as an elusive concept and Winkler et al.’s (2021) narrative approach.

The study comprises two parts. First, the authors conducted a survey among participants of the EUPRERA PhD-workshops between 2007 and 2019, asking respondents about their perception of the state of the field. Second, the authors performed a bibliometric (co-)citation analysis of the young scholars’ most important works.

Results indicate that though the field has progressed in terms of quantity and diversified with regard to established paradigms, it has not matured in a sense that it has settled on a generally accepted theoretical underpinning. However, the data show how the dominant paradigms in the field map onto the co-citation networks that emerged out of the works of young scholars. The authors’ findings imply that this new generation might signal their allegiance to a paradigm by citing the works of its emblematic authors.

Unlike most bibliometric studies, this one uses an author-centered approach, thus studying works that matter most to young academics themselves. Not only do the authors thereby contribute to the analysis of the state of theory building in PR research, but also expand the scope in looking at research as a social system, in which young researchers need to position themselves.

The research aim of this article is to generate novel insights into how public sector organizations (PSOs) strategically communicate with the public about critical issues on social media. To this end, the study explores the public's experiences of the Swedish Police's sense of safety communication on Instagram in the third largest city in Sweden, where the lack of a sense of public safety is a main societal challenge.

The research was designed as a case study employing photo-elicitation interviews as a method to collect the empirical material. A phenomenography approach was used to analyze public experiences of the Swedish Police's Instagram communication in Malmö, Sweden.

Findings show that the police's strategic communication of safety on Instagram is experienced along the dimensions of a sense of protection, a sense of proximity and a sense of ambiguity. Taken together, these dimensions broaden and develop the knowledge of what communicating a sense of safety in the public sphere entails.

This study adds to previous research on strategic communication in public sector organizations by demonstrating what strategic communication accomplishes at the receiving end outside of the organization.