When AI Classifies: What Counts as Public Administration?

Shaoming Cheng, Laurie Schintler

This study examines how alternative systems of scholarly representation identify and characterize broad public administration (PA) and artificial intelligence related public administration (AI-in-PA) scholarship. Using Web of Science and OpenAlex, it compares five approaches based on author-defined, citation-driven, and AI-assisted representations. The results highlight substantial differences in corpus size, publication types, publishing outlets, temporal development, and thematic clustering and structure. The alternative approaches often identify different knowledge domains instead of varied subsets of the same scholarship and therefore produce distinct representations, as evidenced by no overlap in publications and publishing outlets across representations. The findings suggest that algorithmic knowledge organization increasingly influences how interdisciplinary scholarship is classified, structured, and understood and, epistemologically, how its visibility, intellectual structure, and boundaries are represented. AI-enabled scholarly classifications and representations are not neutral but interpretative, likely self-reinforcing, and potentially constrain the evolution and adaptation of disciplinary boundaries. Human disciplinary judgment is essential and is complemented rather than replaced.