Hot Topics in Chinese Public Administration Research in 2025: An Analysis of Articles in International Journals

In the context of the accelerated reconfiguration of the global knowledge system and the continuous evolution of governance paradigms, the internationalization process of China's public administration research has shown a more stable and diversified expansion trend. Chinese scholars not only continuously export their indigenous governance experiences, but also demonstrate a more diverse exploration orientation in theoretical construction and method application, actively participating and promoting the diversified development of the global public administration research.

Since 2019, this research team has been continuously tracking the public administration research papers related to Chinese themes published by Chinese mainland scholars in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals. Continuing with this research tradition, this study further analyzed the public administration research on Chinese themes published by Chinese mainland scholars in SSCI journals in 2025. Through coding and analysis of dimensions such as the author information, collaboration, research topics, and research methods, this study presents the phased features of research in this field, continues its evolutionary trajectory, and provides supplementary evidence for understanding Chinese public administration research from the perspective of international publication.

In 2025, Chinese public administration research continued to maintain a steady development trend on the international academic stage. The influence of Chinese public administration research in the international academic community continued to increase. It is worth noting that in terms of methodology, quantitative methods remain the dominant research orientation for international publications, contrasting with the growing emphasis on case studies in the domestic academic context, highlighting the differences in the preference for knowledge production logic across different academic fields.

This year's research topics continue the structural characteristics of recent years and also bring attention to emerging issues. The key research topics this year are environmental policies, governance and collaboration, e-government, motivation and human resource management, and government relationships. Among them, environmental policies have the largest number of publications, and e-government has seen the most significant growth. As an important part of international public administration research, Chinese public administration research is currently in a critical stage of transitioning from scale expansion to quality improvement. Currently, the core issue of disciplinary development is to strengthen theoretical originality and form a distinctive Chinese perspective.