Faculty, Graduate Student, and Graduate Productivity in Public Administration and Public Affairs Programs, 1986-1993

Abstract

It has been eight years since the productivity of public administration and public affairs programs was last measured by examining the faculty publications selected journals (Legge and Devore, 1987). The purpose of this article is to duplicate and update the rankings presented by Legge and Devote and Morgan et al. (1981) and analyze how program productivity has changed over the years. In addition, an effort to ascertain the effectiveness of public administration programs training and motivating students to conduct scholarly research, I measured the publication productivity of the graduate students and graduates of public administration and public affairs programs. The analysis will show that a relationship exists between faculty and student productivity. The role of public administration programs is not just to teach, it is also to advance the field and find ways to improve the practice of public administration. Providing faculty productivity measures is meaningful because they indicate the extent to which programs are contributing to the knowledge the field. Graduate student and graduate productivity measures are useful because they are a means of determining the degree to which programs are preparing students to add substantively to the field. Uncovering which institutions tend to excel these tasks will provide a starting point from which to determine the program characteristics that lead to important research. It will also furnish prospective doctoral students with information that can assist them selecting graduate schools that best meet their educational needs. Updating the Rankings: 1986-1993 To employ the same methodology used by Morgan et al. and Legge and Devote, this analysis, I adopted the journal article as the unit of analysis.(1) Programs were ranked based on the number of articles published by faculty members 11 journals for the eight-year period 1986 through 1993. To remain consistent with previous studies, I examined the 10 journals used by Morgan et al. and Legge and Devote. These journals included: Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Policy Studies Journal Policy Studies Review, Administration and Society, Public Administration Review, American Review of Public Administration, Public Administration Quarterly, International Journal of Public Administration, The Public Manager, and National Civic Review.(2) For the purpose of examining the productivity of programs public administration versus public policy journals, the first three journals listed were classified as public policy and the remaining journals as public administration. In addition, I added The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory(3) because it did not exist at the time of the earlier studies and has become recognized as a top journal the field (Forrester and Watson, 1994). Because it could be argued that adding The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory to the analysis damages the comparability of this study with the Morgan et al. and Legge and Devore studies, totals which exclude publications The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory are also presented this article the Notes.(4) [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] As Legge and Devore recognized, using this method to measure the productivity of programs is incomplete. Other forms of faculty output such as books, government reports, articles journals that are more specific to certain public administration subfields (such as budgeting or personnel), and articles in journals of basic disciplinary-focused research (such as American Political Science Review) (Legge and Devore, 1987; 148) are not included the study. Despite the importance of these types of scholarly output, I examined only the listed journals for several reasons. First, and most important, using the listed journals enables the work of Morgan et al. and Legge and Devore to be updated. This approach permits a cumulative look at academic productivity within public administration and public affairs programs. …