Financial investigations: Auditing research accounts of communication in business, investor relations, and public relations (1994-2016)

In this article, we investigate investor relations (IR) scholarship across business-centered and communication-centered fields of study from 1994 to 2016. This investigation's aims were to examine development almost a quarter of a century of IR scholarship and to use that to explore how to improve future IR practices and studies. We found that scholarly research in IR and public relations (PR) failed to display many signs of interaction with each other, rarely intersected with other disciplines, and reveal considerable potential for developing synergies from their existing differences. In conclusion, we argue that the current academic insularity also quarantines the practitioners. To address these issues we propose specific future collaborations to improve both IR's scholarly output and its practice.