Patterns of Publishing in Political Science Journals: An Overview of Our Profession Using Bibliographic Data and a Co-Authorship Network

Abstract

ABSTRACT We constructed a co-authorship network of the global political science community. Two scientists are connected if they have co-authored a paper. We drew on more than 67,000 papers published from 1990 to 2013 in one of today’s 96 core journals. The network consists of more than 40,000 authors located worldwide. We found that the community forms a single, interconnected component as well as numerous unconnected authors. Whereas some are highly productive in terms of publications, the majority of authors published only a single paper, which suggests significant turnover in the community. Using information from the papers (e.g., title, journal, and abstract), we investigated how different subcommunities organize and interconnect, how journals reach out into the community, and how individual scientists cooperate. We also investigated how the network has evolved in the last two decades. Our analysis is supplemented by a bibliographic analysis that describes major changes in publication patterns.