Commentary: Mapping a More Specialized Public Administration

• Author: Donald P. Moynihan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12782
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017

512 Public Administration Review • July | August 2017

Donald P. Moynihan is director of

the La Follette School of Public Affairs

at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

His research examines performance

management, administrative burdens,

election administration, and employee

behavior. He is a fellow of the National

Academy of Public Administration and

prior winner of the Kershaw Award for

outstanding contributions to the study of

public policy and management.

E-mail: dmoynihan@lafollette.wisc.edu

Commentary

C haoqun Ni, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, and Alice

Robbin are relative strangers to the scholarly

world of public administration. They seek

to explain it to us through a series of bibliographic

metrics. Perhaps they are like the sabermetricians

who upended the ritualistic world of baseball,

challenging the wisdom of veteran coaches by using

metrics rather than experience to identify the most

productive players (Moynihan 2006 ). Their article,

“Examining the Evolution of the Field of Public

Administration through a Bibliometric Analysis

of Public Administration Review, ” tells us who are

the most productive players in the field of public

administration, at least when it comes to publishing

in PAR. On the other hand, it does not, and does not

aspire to, upend deeper notions of how the game of

public administration scholarship is played in the way

that sabermetrics revolutionized baseball. We gain no

notion of what makes for a productive scholar.

1

Perhaps a better metaphor is mapmaking. The

authors are cartographers, using numbers to establish

the topography of a field that emerged from a

discipline and is still finding its way. Perhaps it is this

idea that public administration scholars are finding

our way makes us open to numbers that help us

identify where we stand, how we have changed, and,

by extension, who we are. Just as maps, or at least

Donald P. Moynihan

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Mapping a More Specialized Public Administration

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 4, pp. 512–514. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12782.