Content Analysis of Academic Papers on Quality and Performance Management in Public Administration

Quality and performance management are a highly researched topics and thus papers dealing with both concepts can be found in a number of academic journals. The purpose of the paper is to conduct a content analysis of papers dealing with quality and/or performance management in order to give answers to five research question: 1. Which components of quality and performance management are most represented in academic papers? 2. Can a shift in trends in papers dealing with quality and performance management be noticed? 3. Are there differences between Western and Eastern European scholars when writting on quality and performance management? 4. What share of researches on quality and performance management is oriented towards local government? 5. Which research methods are used in papers dealing with quality and performance management? Using the SCIimago journal & country ranking five top ranked journals from Western Europe and all ranked journals from Eastern Europe in addition to one journal from Croatia are chosen. Using the titles and abstracts of the papers, all the papers in the 2000-2016 period are being examined and only those papers dealing with quality and performance management are taken in further examination. The selected papers are being in-depth analysed and categorized and results are used to give answers to the stated research questions.