Writing impactful reviews to rejuvenate public administration: A framework and recommendations

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Bert George,Lotte B. Andersen,Jeremy L. Hall,Sanjay K. Pandey
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13756

GUEST EDITORIAL

Writing impactful reviews to rejuvenate public administration:

A framework and recommendations

Bert George

1

| Lotte B. Andersen

2

| Jeremy L. Hall

3

| Sanjay K. Pandey

4

1

Department of Public and International Affairs,

City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon,

Hong Kong

2

Department of Political Science, Aarhus

University, Aarhus, Denmark

3

School of Public Administration, University of

Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA

4

Trachtenberg School, The George Washington

University, Washington, DC, USA

Correspondence

Jeremy L. Hall, School of Public Administration,

University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816,

USA.

Email: Jeremy.hall@ucf.edu

[Correction added on 16 December 2023, after

first online publication: The copyright line was

changed.]

Abstract

Literature reviews have become widespread in public administration, especially in the

past decade. These reviews typically adopt widely-accepted approaches with many

drawing upon systematized approaches to review in fields like medicine and psychol-

ogy. Public administration, however, is a professional, design-oriented discipline,

focused on enhancing theory to solve real-life policy, administrative, and managerial

challenges. Recognizing the unique traditions and purposes in public administration

scholarship, it is important to take stock of how public administration scholars “do”

reviews, with the aim of providing recommendations to rejuvenate the state of the

art in reviewing. We present a framework to guide review efforts in public administra-

tion centered on purpose (why?), object (what?), subject (who?), community (for

whom?) and practices (how?). Next, we present different approaches to doing reviews

and how those approaches present different answers to the questions raised above.

Finally, we discuss examples of public administration reviews within each approach

and conclude with specific recommendations for researchers and practitioners who

want to use reviews to rejuvenate public administration.

Over a decade ago, an editorial appearing in Public

Administration Review called for more effort to systema-

tize research findings in the field of public administration

(Perry, 2012). That call did not go unanswered. Over the

past decade, we have seen an increase in the number of

reviews and meta-analyses aimed specifically at systema-

tizing research findings on specific public administration

themes. Between January 2013 and July 2023, PAR pub-

lished 26 review articles that included the term “review”

or “meta-analysis”in the title. In addition to these 26 arti-

cles, several PAR articles employ literature review

methods without including the term review in the title

(Battaglio Jr et al., 2019; Bozeman & Su, 2015; Bryson

et al., 2013; Walker, Brewer, et al., 2019; Walker, Chandra,

et al., 2019). Review articles can have significant academic

and/or practical impact. Indeed, reviews in public admin-

istration are among PAR’s most cited articles (Bozeman &

Su, 2015; Ritz et al., 2016), have been awarded best article

prizes from the American Society for Public Administra-

tion (Tang et al., 2018), and have even been picked-up in

influential policy reports and initiatives such as the US

White House Budget Guidance (George et al., 2019).

Yet, despite the increased popularity of reviews in

public administration, little effort has been invested

in investigating how we “do”reviews in our field.

Indeed, public administration (and the social sciences

more broadly) is lacking so-called meta-science research

(Schooler, 2014), which is research centered on how

scholars “do”research. Some interesting recent excep-

tions include George and Pandey (2017), Hendren et al.

(2023), Walker, Brewer, et al. (2019), and Walker,

Chandra, et al. (2019).Thelackofmeta-sciencestudies

of public administration makes it highly relevant to ask

whether we blindly follow approaches or methods

developed in other fields like medicine or psychology

that may not fit the varied and numerous purposes of

reviews in public administration. For example, the

PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic

Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines are typically

used in many recently published systematic reviews in

public administration, but find their origins in medicine

(Page et al., 2021), which is a vastly different field com-

pared with the design-oriented, professional, social sci-

ence discipline of public administration (Barzelay, 2019;

Simon, 1996). Of course, we can learn a great deal from

review approaches and methods from other fields, but

we also need to consider the unique identity of our

disciplineandtheroleofreviewstherein.

Received: 10 February 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13756

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:1517–1527. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar 1517