State of Public Administration Scientific Research in the Visegrad Countries – A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

As a discipline in its own right, public administration has a variety of interpretations in European countries, which can be found at the intersection of three traditional disciplines: law, policy and management. The Central European region, such as the Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia), is of particular interest for the analysis of the state of public administration research, as it only came to the fore after the change of regime. The present study undertakes a bibliometric analysis of the publications in the field of public administration in these countries for the period 2011-2020. The publications studied were indexed in the Scopus citation database, and the tools used for the analysis were the Sci Val research support platform and the vosViewer bibliometric analysis software. The results show the different orientations, with Hungarian and Polish authors approaching the discipline from a legal perspective, while Czech and Slovak authors take a management perspective. Regional journals and conference publications dominate in terms of publication places. In terms of co-authorship, regional partners also stand out, while cooperation with Western European countries takes the form of fewer but better cited publications.