Abstract
Networks have generated increasing interest among public administration scholars. At the same time, the network literature has been criticized as being inconsistent and fragmented. A discourse analysis of the public administration network literature was conducted to assess the level of coherence or fragmentation of the literature, identify commonly used network attributes, and develop a minimal definition based on those common attributes. Analysis revealed a rich although highly fragmented literature: 57 attributes were identified with networks; none occurred in more than half of the surveyed literature.