Collaborative Governance Research Published in SSCI Public Administration Journals: a Bibliometric Analysis

Collaborative governance enables cross-boundary cooperation in an era of globalization. It help build smooth and beneficial relationships between multiple actors, including government institutions, civil society, and private sectors. Collaborative governance research covers the currently prominent issues such as intergovernmental relations, public private partnership, local innovations, social network, etc. So far, no sufficient study has been made to disclose the overall picture of collaborative governance research. To enhance our understanding of the group of studies, this study attempts to fill the gap by exploring the trend and characteristics of collaborative governance research published in SSCI public administration journals included in the Web of Science (WoS) database.
We use bibliometric methods to conduct a systematic review on 574 articles of collaborative governance research published in 47 SSCI public administration journals. It aims to generate various quantitative results, including journal ranking, title and keywords co-occurrences network, citation analysis, co-citation network, co-authorship network, bibliographic coupling network, and so on. In this way, this research will reveal the latest trend and characteristics of collaborative governance studies. Consequently, the research result will provide a roadmap for scholars in this filed to have an overall understanding and find potential topics for future studies.