Introducing our vision and plans

Scholarship is the dissemination of knowledge through teaching and the creation of knowledge through research. This works best when teaching is informed by research and/or lived experience and vice versa. Scholarship in the study of public administration (PA) is and should be informed by both the experience of public office holders in political (appointee) or career civil service positions as well as the research of academics into the various elements relevant to understanding the position and role of citizens and of government in society at large. Public Administration Review (PAR) is the journal published under the auspices of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), and both ASPA (established in 1939) and PAR (first issue in the fall of 1940) were created to keep the bridge between practitioners and academics alive. Considering the early decades of PA journals in various Western countries, practitioners were quite actively involved in journals in Australia, various European countries, and the USA. In the past five to six decades, it has been reported that many scholarly journals increasingly gravitated towards scholarship focused on an academic readership. This trend was encouraged by the assessment of quality scholarship via publication record, and (later) citation scores and impact factors (we should add the increased emphasis in the past decade on grant-funded research). We acknowledge the need for tracking academic scholarship with such measures as citations in, for example, Web of Science and Google Scholar, and impact factors. However, the most common metrics of scholarship do not provide evidence of how research and teaching influence (a) the world of decision and policymaking in the public sector and (b) what effect it has on human beings.

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