Two Decades of Governance and Public Administration Scholarship: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis of 191 Journal Articles (2003–2026)

Abstract

Governance and public administration have become one of the most extensively studied domains in the social sciences, yet the literature remains fragmented across disciplinary boundaries, national contexts, and languages. This study presents a systematic literature review (SLR) combined with a bibliometric and thematic-mapping analysis of 191 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2003 and 2026, extracted from a structured bibliographic database (RIS format) originally comprising 199 records. Following a PRISMA-informed screening protocol, seven corrupted metadata entries and one duplicate record were removed, yielding a final analytic corpus of 191 unique articles. Publication metadata were processed using Python-based bibliometric routines, and thematic structure was derived through Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting combined with k-means clustering of titles, author keywords, and abstracts, supported by a keyword co-occurrence network. The results show a marked acceleration of scholarly output after 2017, a highly dispersed publication landscape across 152 distinct outlets with no dominant journal, and an extremely fragmented authorship structure (373 unique contributors across 191 articles) indicative of a still-maturing, loosely connected research community. Five thematic clusters were identified: (1) Good Governance, Ethics, and Public Service Quality; (2) Human Capital, Community and Village Development; (3) Public Policy, Innovation, and Decentralization; (4) State, Bureaucracy, Politics, and Democratic Theory; and (5) Employee Performance and Organizational Behaviour in the Public Sector. The largest cluster concerns state, bureaucratic, and political-theoretical debates, while employee-performance research constitutes the smallest but most methodologically homogeneous stream. The review reveals persistent gaps in cross-national comparative research, digital-governance scholarship, and methodological rigor, and proposes a forward-looking research agenda for governance and public administration studies, particularly within Southeast Asian and Timor-Leste-related contexts. The study contributes a replicable, computationally assisted SLR–bibliometric protocol suitable for domains characterized by linguistically mixed and moderately structured bibliographic data. Keywords: good governance; public administration; bibliometric analysis; systematic literature review; thematic clustering; bureaucracy; public policy