Irreducible polynomials from a cubic transformation

Let $R(x)=g(x)/h(x)$ be a rational expression of degree three over the finite field ${\mathbb{F}}_q$. We count the irreducible polynomials in ${\mathbb{F}}_q[x]$, of a given degree, that have the form $h{(x)}^{\mathrm{deg}f}\cdot f(R(x))$ for some $f(x)\in {\mathbb{F}}_q[x]$. As an example of application of our results, we recover the number of irreducible transformation shift registers of order three, which were computed by Jiang and Yang in 2017.