Scientific production in Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced great growth in recent years (Álvarez-Muñoz y Pérez-Montoro, 2016; Santa y Herrero, 2010), due in part to the increase in public investment in science in these countries and the indexing of their journals in global (Scopus or Wos) and regional (Latindex or Redalyc) databases of bibliographic references. However, in the area of communication, the publication of academic articles is still embryonic. There are several academic studies (Flores-García y Becerril-García, 2020; López- Ornelas et al., 2017; Rogel-Salazar et al., 2017) that highlight the scarce of disclosure of scientific knowledge in this region, remarking the limited presence of communication journals published in Latin America and indexed in databases. In the specific area of public relations, the conceptualization and recognition of this discipline in the academic and professional field has been increasing since the mid-twentieth century. However, despite the progress experienced, the small number of existing studies on the subject in these journals, justify this investigation line. In this sense, this research, within the framework of bibliometric studies, proposes to determine the position occupied by public relations in the academic production about communication of the main journals of the Latin American Caribbean in the last ten years (2010-2020); as well as analyzing the main characteristics of these publications by examining the areas of knowledge of the published texts, the institutions from which they come or its authorship, among other aspects such as the object of study and the methodological procedure used in the research. The scientific journals that make up the sample (Comunicación y Sociedad, from Mexico, Palabra Clave and Signo y Pensamiento, both from Colombia) have been selected on the basis of representativeness criteria such as the impact index in the Scopus bibliographic database and the geographical scope of the Latin American Caribbean. The results indicate that the discipline of public relations is marginal in the overall scientific production in the area of communication in the Latin American Caribbean. Most of the texts published by the journals with the highest impact index in the region focus on fields related to communication, but are far removed from the specific area of public relations. However, it is noticeable that in recent years greater attention has been paid to this discipline, with an increase in scientific production in the period between 2016 and 2020.
The findings obtained also allow us to establish a profile of the scientific production on public relations disseminated in the decade from 2010 to 2020 by the leading journals in the Latin American Caribbean. A collective authorship, balanced in terms of the sex of the signatories, mainly from universities in Latin America and Spain, and the use of empirical approaches from a qualitative perspective, define the type of academic production analysed. Despite the limitations that this research presents when it comes to extrapolating the results to the whole of the scientific production on public relations in territories other than the Latin American Caribbean, it is outlined as an exploratory study and a first approach to the still incipient research on the discipline of public relations in Caribbean academic journals.
Toward an inclusive agenda of Open Science for Communication Research: a Latin American approach
