Reliability of Google Scholar (GS), Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) is examined using publications and citations of 186 scholars in 14 U.S. advertising and public relations (ADPR) programs. Career duration is controlled, and an integrated impact (II) index is proposed as a practical solution. Results suggest there are trade-offs between the uncertainty of GS’s search parameters for more inclusive coverage and the curated collections of Scopus and WoS that might undercount some influential authors or works. To further demonstrate the discipline’s value, we must pay more attention to rigor and accuracy of methods that will lead to improved outcomes.

The U.S. confronts an unprecedented public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, in the presidential election year in 2020. In such a compound situation, a real-time dynamic examination of how the general public ascribe the crisis responsibilities taking account to their political ideologies is helpful for developing effective strategies to manage the crisis and diminish hostility toward particular groups caused by polarization. Social media, such as Twitter, provide platforms for the public’s COVID-related discourse to form, accumulate, and visibly present. Meanwhile, those features also make social media a window to monitor the public responses in real-time. This research conducted a computational text analysis of 2,918,376 tweets sent by 829,686 different U.S. users regarding COVID-19 from January 24 to May 25, 2020. Results indicate that the public’s crisis attribution and attitude toward governmental crisis responses are driven by their political identities. One crisis factor identified by this study (i.e., threat level) also affects the public’s attribution and attitude polarization. Additionally, we note that pandemic fatigue was identified in our findings as early as in March 2020. This study has theoretical, practical, and methodological implications informing further health communication in a heated political environment.

No abstract