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Enciklopedijski rječnik odnosa s javnošću - Encyclopaedic Public Relations Dictionary

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Prof Zoran Tomić, PhD, published the Encyclopaedic Public Relations Dictionary in the year that marks the 100th anniversary of the first book in the field of public relations, Crystallizing Public Opinion authored by the "father" of public relations, Edward L. Bernays. Professor Tomić's work is the first world Encyclopaedic dictionary in the public relations field. To date, no author or group of authors has created a comprehensive dictionary that would standardize the terms of the public relations profession. The publishers are the University of Mostar and the publishing house Synopsis from Zagreb and Sarajevo.

Professor Tomić points out in the Introduction that it is important to know that there is no "real" public relations dictionary in the world today in order to understand the specific scientific weight of this world work, which he had been creating for twelve years. "In the eighties of the last century (1983), F. Jafkins wrote the Dictionary of Marketing, Advertising & Public Relations. Looking at that dictionary, it is evident that not even ten percent of the terms are from the field of public relations, so it can hardly be considered a dictionary of public relations", says Tomić and adds that while searching for reference work, he came across shorter online glossaries that according to UNESCO standards, do not belong in the book category. He tried to compensate for the lack of a "world" dictionary by consulting the American Encyclopedia of Public Relations (ed. R.L. Heath, 2005) and the British International Encyclopedia of Communication (Oxford University Press, 1989), as well as several handbooks and other works in the field of public relations and communications.

The Encyclopaedic Public Relations Dictionary is a significant undertaking methodologically and in terms of content. Considering the interdisciplinarity of public relations, which binds primarily the information and communication field, then sociology, economics, psychology, political science, and other scientific fields, it was demanding to choose the terms included in the dictionary. The author, guided by the postulates of public relations as an open profession, also included general concepts necessary for understanding the specific concepts of the profession itself. More than 3,000 terms are covered on 472 pages, which synthesize the interdisciplinary nature of the public relations profession. In terms of structure, content, and meaning, the Encyclopaedic Public Relations Dictionary is intended for experts and practitioners, students of all fields arising from the interdisciplinarity of the profession, managers and communication managers, media and journalists, but also for everyone who participates in communication with the public on a professional level.

As mentioned earlier, due to the emphasis on interdisciplinarity, the author engaged a significant number of reviewers who are distinguished scientists.

In the Afterword, Prof Ratko Zelenika, leading Croatian methodologist and author of more than a dozen scientific books, points out that Prof Zoran Tomić, PhD, "as an excellent and international connoisseur and expert of universal and specific/specialist public relations, with his capital work Public Relations - Theory and Practice (2016), and especially with the Encyclopaedic Public Relations Dictionary (2023), offered up-to-date and high-quality knowledge, findings, principles, rules, legalities, concepts". He points out that in the Encyclopaedic Public Relations Dictionary, the following scientific methods were used in appropriate combinations: methods of analysis and synthesis, inductive and deductive methods, methods of abstraction and concretization, proofs and refutation methods, empirical methods, comparative methods, descriptive methods, and compilation methods.

The book is divided into Introduction, Foreword, Dictionary, Glossary, and Appendices, which include Literature, Afterword by Prof Ratko Zelenika, PhD, and the Author's Biography. The terms are graphically arranged appropriately and transparently. In the case of syntagms and established foreign terms, the terms that include explanations are indicated, which facilitates the search. The Glossary, at the end of the book, provides a list of all terms translated into English, which significantly contributes to the standardization of the profession and uniform terminology both in Croatian and English. Precisely because of the openness and interdisciplinary nature of the profession, scientists must work on standardization and uniformity of terms and their meanings. In this sense, the Dictionary plays a key role and brings a scientific breakthrough that is yet to be recognized.

About the reasons for starting such a demanding scientific project, in the Introduction, Professor Tomić points out the fact that he has intensively studied, analyzed, and evaluated current theoretical and practical problems and phenomena of public relations for more than twenty years, during which he studied more than two thousand current bibliographic units of the world's most famous scientists. "I realized that the particularities of public relations in general, and especially numerous, more or less, affirmed functional types of public relations, can only be thought through, understood, interpreted with knowledge of the relevant features of thousands of terms (entries) with predominant elements and components of universal and specific/specialist public relations. Namely, in its almost hundred-year lifespan, public relations, as a monoscientific discipline, developed, modified, affirmed, verified, and transformed into a globally known and recognized multidisciplinary science, i.e., into an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, polydisciplinary, and transdisciplinary science and art," writes Professor Tomić.

Encyclopaedic Public Relations Dictionary, the first such dictionary in the world, is a step forward both in science and practice. The comprehensiveness of terms from various fields and branches of science brings it wide application and provides a broad knowledge of basic terms from various sciences to those who will use them. All of the above contribute to the value of such exceptional scientific work