Research Trends in Japanese Public Administration: Statistical Content Analyses of Article Titles in Public Administration Review Quarterly (1978 to 2019)

This paper quantitatively explains research trends in postwar administrative studies in Japan using statistical analyses of nearly 40 years of article titles from Public Administration Review Quarterly, from its first issue (1978) to the 165th issue (2019). Co-occurrence network analysis and correspondence analysis revealed changes in research interests. There was substantially more research on administrative reforms through the post-war Showa and Heisei eras. The configuration figures of correspondence analysis can be interpreted to mean that the first dimension concerns administrative reforms; the second dimension concerns historical events/administrative systems; and the third dimension concerns evaluations and Kaizen. Co-occurrence network analysis showed that the studies during the Showa era (1978–1988) could be partly characterized by the two extracted compound words: the United States and the United Kingdom. Japan became a feature of studies of public administration during the Heisei era (1989–2018). These features are basically consistent with the previous quantitative studies.