A veteran editor's roundtable on peer review, shifting priorities, and what MPA/MPP scholars should study next
On September 8, 2026, UNU-EGOV hosted Webinar #8, "Lessons Learned from Decades as a Public Administration Editor." Guest speaker James L. Perry began as a graduate student reviewer in the early 1970s, later served as Editor-in-Chief of Public Administration Review (2012-2017), and currently co-edits the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration.
His path shows editorial work is not ancillary; it is central to public administration education and decides which governance evidence shapes practice.
Senior editors such as James L. Perry, former Editor-in-Chief of Public Administration Review (PAR) and current co-editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration1, rarely describe an ideal manuscript as simply technically sound. They look for three linked qualities: methodological rigor, a clear contribution to theory, and relevance for public administration practice. Even a well-executed paper can fall short if it does not advance all three.
Most desk rejections at PAR and comparable journals happen within about two weeks, often not because the research is weak but because the manuscript does not match the journal's scope or asks a question the chosen methods cannot answer. PAR uses double-anonymized review and states a target of 90 days from receipt to editor decision. Author-reported experiences vary: one survey-based view reports a first review round of roughly five months, while publisher aggregate data reports a median eight days to first decision. These figures measure different steps, so they are not contradictory. Top public administration journals commonly take three to six months for initial review and a year or more from submission to acceptance.
Review criteria center on originality and significance, clarity of objectives and method, fit with the journal's focus, and the strength of theoretical or practical contribution. At least two reviewers typically assess each manuscript, and accepted papers average just over one round of revision. Acceptance rates at flagship journals such as PAR are often below 10 percent.
Bibliometric studies published between 2020 and 2026 point to several clear accelerations in public administration scholarship. The strongest growth clusters around artificial intelligence, digital government and transformation, and social equity, though leading regions and journals differ by topic. The table below summarizes the most consistent findings from recent literature analyses.
| Topic | Growth Trend Since 2020 | Leading Regions or Journals | Why It's Rising |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artificial intelligence in public administration (global) | More than a threefold increase: 135 articles from 2010 to 2019 versus 421 from 2020 to 2024. | United States and China dominate total publication volume; Germany and Japan achieve higher average citations per article. | AI's expanding role in automating decision processes, enhancing service delivery, and supporting data-driven governance. |
| AI implementation in Latin American public administration | Significant growth from 2020 to 2024, with peaks in 2021 and 2023. | Brazil (18 publications), Mexico (12), and Colombia (10) lead the region. | 62 percent of publications focus on operational efficiency, digital governance, transparency, and citizen engagement. |
| Digital transformation in public administration (global) | Substantial post-2020 expansion in publication output, citation visibility, and international collaboration. | Distribution is uneven across countries and sources; certain national networks and journals are emerging as hubs. | N/A |
| Digital transformation, AI, and e-government (Scopus corpus) | 1,877 Scopus-indexed journal articles published between 2020 and 2024; sharp rise in adoption- and impact-focused studies. | N/A | Governments' push to digitize services and assess outcomes drives publication growth. |
| Social equity in public administration | Renewed efforts and progress from 2018 to 2023; intensified conceptual and empirical development in the most recent five-year period. | Mainstream public administration and policy outlets; 22 journals covered in a 2009 to 2019 equity review. | Debates following the Minnowbrook at 50 conference and contemporary social justice movements have pushed equity back to the center. |
| Public administration with, of, and through AI | AI-related publications have more than doubled since 2010, with especially rapid acceleration in the early 2020s. | N/A | Foundation models and large language models expand AI's capacity to interpret, generate, and interact with human language, accelerating adoption and new research questions. |
Editorial roles shape which governance and public management evidence enters the literature that informs decisions, making service on editorial boards a lever for advancing rigor, relevance, and cross-national scholarly exchange.
Public administration scholarship is moving away from broad theoretical debates and toward questions that practitioners can act on. Three trends stand out: digital government and AI, equity-focused research, and implementation science. For MPA and MPP students, these labels mark the research most likely to shape hiring, budgeting, and service design decisions in the next decade.
Public sector digital transformation is no longer a niche topic. For a public administrator reading the literature, this means more studies on how algorithms, data systems, and automated decision making affect service delivery, access, and accountability. The practical question for responsible AI in public administration is not just whether a tool works, but whether it worsens existing gaps.
Equity-focused research asks who benefits from a policy and who is left out. It moves past aggregate outcomes toward disaggregated effects by race, income, geography, disability, and language access. Practitioners can use these studies to audit enrollment, wait times, and compliance burdens rather than assuming uniform impact.
Implementation science studies why well-designed policies succeed or fail once they meet real agencies. For administrators, it offers usable lessons about staffing, training, coordination, and feedback loops that support evidence-based policymaking, not just policy theory. The value for practitioners is direct: it separates policy promises from delivery failures and offers evidence about what to change first.
James L. Perry's Managing Organizations to Sustain Passion for Public Service (2021) illustrates how a long-running concern with public service motivation now intersects with newer equity and digital-era questions, such as how prosocial motivation survives under automation or in roles focused on reducing disparities.1 Across these shifts, the field is becoming more applied and problem-focused. Editors increasingly reward manuscripts that specify a governance problem, engage practitioners, and offer actionable implications.
Where public administration knowledge gets published reflects a live tension: the field's most visible journals still skew toward the United States and Western Europe, while Asia-Pacific and Global South scholars push for comparative work grounded in their own governance contexts. James L. Perry's current co-editorship of the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration is a useful anchor for that shift, showing how senior editors can broaden the field without treating flagship U.S.-based journals as the only standard.
As recently as 2020, more than 80% of all public administration scholarship was still conducted in Europe and the United States. The internationalization trend is real but incomplete. The Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration frames the Asia Pacific as a place for advancing global knowledge with under-utilized perspectives and methods, particularly on topics such as public service motivation and public management.
Regional outlets do not simply compete with U.S.-based journals. They complement them by foregrounding comparative questions that flagship journals often leave underexplored. The journal's 2026 editorial direction, for example, prioritizes research comparing Asia Pacific countries, the Asia-Pacific and other regions, and the Global North and Global South. A 2026 special issue on building global public administration knowledge from Global South perspectives, focused on faith, culture, and traditions, makes that priority concrete.
Methodological norms also vary. Experimental research in the Asia-Pacific remains concentrated in a small number of institutions and depends strongly on international collaboration, so country-level trends should not assume uniform methods. For MPA and MPP students, country-level research trends therefore mean reading regional journals alongside flagship titles while learning how to write a literature review in public administration, because each surfaces different governance problems, evidence needs, and publishing expectations that bear on MPA curriculum requirements.
How can a working public administrator actually use peer-reviewed research when most journal articles feel written for other academics? The short answer is to read for the decision, not the method, and to expect journals to get better at helping you do that.
Editors increasingly ask reviewers to judge whether a manuscript speaks to public managers, not just other scholars. Practitioner relevance has moved from optional framing to an explicit acceptance criterion. A study can be methodologically sound and still fall short if its implications never leave the seminar room.
James L. Perry's Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-first Century, developed with the Volcker Alliance, translates research into questions about institutional design, public service motivation, and accountability in terms agency leaders can actually use.1 It treats governance practice as the audience, not an afterthought.
The distance between what gets published and what gets applied remains wide. Access and jargon are part of it, but incentives matter too: journals reward novelty and citation counts, while agencies need contextual, usable evidence in public administration policy implementation. Perry's editorial career shows that gatekeepers can narrow this gap when they keep both scholars and practitioners in mind. For MPA and MPP students, reading with a practitioner's question in mind is the habit that bridges the divide between public policy making and application.
Editorial service is not an ancillary chore; it is a core professional competency that determines which evidence shapes public administration practice.
