Can machine understand public administration literature? Applying text mining for systematic review

Abstract

Systematic reviews summarize the progress of studies and pave roads for future research in an academic field. However, conducting a systematic literature review can be burdensome and time-consuming. Computer-assisted methods such as text mining techniques have been increasingly applied to improve systematic reviews in public administration. To test the reliability of using text mining for systematic literature reviews, this study uses clustering, topic modeling, automatic multi-term extraction, and text network to systematically review articles published in Chinese Public Administration Review from 2002 to 2019. By comparing machine-produced topics with existing human-coded themes, findings show that applying text mining methods for systematic reviews can be reliable and effective with cautions. The study also offers practical suggestions for researchers to apply text mining methods for systematic literature reviews.