Commentary: Viewing the Arc of Public Administration Research through PAR Articles, 1940–2013

• Author: Frances Stokes Berry
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12783
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017

510 Public Administration Review • July | August 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 4, pp. 510–512. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12783.

Frances Stokes Berry is the Askew

Eminent Scholar and Frank Sherwood

Professor in the Askew School of Public

Administration and Policy at Florida

State University. A fellow of the National

Academy of Public Administration, she

received the Distinguished Research Award

(2013) from the American Society for Public

Administration and the Network of Schools

of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration

(NASPAA). She also served as president

of the Public Management Research

Association (2013–15) and president of

NASPPAA (2011). Her expertise is in policy

and management innovation diffusion

as well as strategic and performance

management.

E-mail : fberry@fsu.edu

Commentary

P ublic administration academicians and

practitioners alike know that Public

Administration Review ( PAR ) has been a leading

journal for our field since its founding in 1940.

The work of Chaoqun Ni, Cassidy R. Sugimoto,

and Alice Robbin provides evidence of a field that is

changing its topics and its position vis-à-vis political

science. The authors make a point of stating that

bibliometric analysis provides the “what” but not the

“why.” What can we learn about the arc of public

administration topics and theories, its connectedness

with political science and other disciplines, and the

scholars and universities that have been productive

in PAR through this bibliometric analysis of PAR? 1

Ni, Sugimoto, and Robbin have done a fine job of

describing the trends and data they have charted over

the 73 years. I find the analysis based on three time

periods to be particularly helpful in understanding

trends, as these three periods—1940–64, 1965–89,

and 1990–2013—give or take a few years, reflect

significant shifts in public administration research and

topics studied.

Of the 75 influential articles in PAR ’s life span, 29

or 39 percent were written from 1990 to 2013.

Coterminous with the release of Reinventing

Government (1992), the arrival of total quality

management in government, New Public

Management, performance budgeting and

management, and governance—all emerging in the

early 1990s—we see the article topics in PA R begin

changing to reflect these major developments in

public administration. When we examine the topics

of these 29 articles and the keywords from 1990 to

2013, we see very little overlap with the keywords of

earlier periods. Indeed, the influence of governance

and management topics is very clear during those 23

years. Of the 29 articles, three each have governance,

performance, e-government, or public service motivation

in the title, while two articles each have networks,

citizen participation, collaboration, and New Public

Management. Other keywords are strategy, innovation,

and accountable. Almost none of these words shows

up prior to 1990 in keywords and titles. Thus, 1990

begins a sea change in our field.

2

The year 1990 also marks the rise of public

management journals in public administration,

contributing to the separation of public

administration from political science and the

increasing quantitative analysis of public management

research. The co-citation bar graphs (figure S2) and

network sociograms (figure S3–S5) illustrate a unique

view of how public administration and political

science research have developed based on journals

and co-citations. Figure S2 shows a distinct cleaving

apart of public administration scholars drawing

from political science and public administration

research based on citations. In the first period,

public administration scholars cited political science

journals in more than 80 percent of their references,

while by the third period starting in 1990, public

administration scholars cited public administration

work in 44 percent of the references, and political

science work fell to 47 percent of the citations. Thus,

public administration as a field has expanded and is

both drawing from and building upon itself much

more than it did in the earlier years.

Scanning figures S3, S4, and S5, which show

the development over the three time periods

of co-citations among journals and fields, key

observations can be made. First, there has been

enormous growth in the journals of both political

science and public administration/management

over the 73 years. And yet a growing independence

of public administration journals from political

science journals is clearly demonstrated in figure S4,

while PA R continues to be a primary journal linking

public administration and political science based

on co-citations.

3 The density of journals changes

considerably between figure S4 (70 journals) and

figure S5 (183 journals). In figure S5, we see that

both public administration and political science have

many more journals by 1990 than earlier. By the

last period (1990–2013), the nodes of PAR, Public

Viewing the Arc of Public Administration Research through

PAR Articles, 1940–2013

Frances Stokes Berry

Florida State University