摘要：According to Pollitt (2017: 557), the field of public administration has been historically strongly tied to practitioners and their interests. Dubnick (2018) opined that these ties were so strong as to hold back public administration to blossom as a well-regarded social science discipline. However, for many researchers, the applied nature of public administration, as measured by relevance, is uncontroversial in Canada (Lindquist 2018: 422) and abroad (Nesbit et al. 2011: 115). Canadian Public Administration, the journal of the Institute of Public Administration in Canada, has held a longstanding tradition that articles should be of interest to both communities. A debate for the 25th anniversary of Canadian Public Administration in 1982 between David M. Cameron, a professor at Dalhousie University, and Michael Pitfield, Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary of the Cabinet, encapsulates this tension between academia and practice. Pitfield (1982: 495) opined that public administration is an engaged profession and discipline, and which "(r)elevance is the key, the test." Cameron agreed that the profession and the discipline must be linked. However, he argued "that the value of the discipline must be judged not merely by its utility to practitioners but, ultimately, by its contribution to the public good" (Cameron 1982:496). Remnants of this debate persist: the puzzle of how to accurately investigate the link between scholars and practitioners is unresolved. As we will detail, the tracking of research themes which have animated public administration scholarship has been one option. Inter-journal and inter-jurisdictional comparisons have constituted other avenues. However, the mutually reinforcing relationship between academic work and practitioner readership necessitates some measure of convergence and dialogue, as well as some degree of attention and reflection.
