The significant advance of public administration as a stand-alone discipline with interdisciplinary approach has led to a proliferation of journals catering to the field of public administration. The remarkable growth of the field elicits the need for bibliometric analysis in order to gauge the impact and influence of the journals. There are several popular metrics for measuring the impact of the journals, the impact factor and H-index being the most popular. This paper offers a bibliometric analysis incorporating a wide range of citation metrics to provide readers with a comprehensive view of the top 100 journals, along with an in-depth analysis of the top three journals among them. Therefore, the goal of the paper is to help researchers make informed decisions when opting for a journal to publish their work. First, the paper provides a brief overview of public administration as a field of study, its evolution and recent advancements. The paper then moves to explain citation metrics and the key aspects pertaining to it. The next part which also forms the core of the paper offers a tabular presentation and analysis of the top 100 journals with a range of citation metrics such as impact factor, H-index, SJR, etc. and key social and thematic aspects of the top three among them. The analysis shows that Administrative Science Quarterly is the still the topmost journal with an impact factor of 10.1 and demonstrates the dominance of co-authorship over single authorship across all the journals in the field.
Tomar et al. (Fri,) studied this question.