State of affairs

At the annual EGPA conference in Madrid, there was a launch meeting of several editors of journals on public administration and management. The goal was twofold. On the one hand this meeting was a forum for exchanging information about the organisation of public administration journals.

The meeting clearly showed that there is a large enthusiasm about the database project. Twenty editors of journals all around Europe attended the meeting. More than 22 journals are already included in the network.
The table below presents an overview of the countries and journals included in the network, and whether they have delivered abstracts in the Original language (O), English (E), and/or French (F), or whether they have committed themselves to provide content (indicated in yellow).

There is a modular project for a systematic translation of abstracts into French.

Overview of languages and journals (updated list: Septembre 2008)

Next steps

Once the software and a critical mass of abstracts is available, there is an expansion strategy to have a higher coverage of significant languages and journals.
Also there is an invitation to all journals to go back in time and increase the coverage of the past.
Finally, there is a protocol to increase the quality and standardise the format of the abstracts for the future, and to have a yearly addition to the database of each last year’s output.

A board will be established to oversee the database. This board will consist of the editors of the journals contributing to this database. The goals of this board are peer based quality control, stimulate and organise the exploitation and use of the database, develop policies for collaboration, support policies for academic recognition of the journals in the database, and organise any event based on the database to collaborate across languages.