Research on Research: A Decade of Quantitative and Field Research on International Organizations

Abstract

Writing in 1966, I examined the degree to which changes in research methods in political science are affecting research on international organizations and made some suggestions for extending the use of more rigorous empirical methods in international organization research. This effort stimulated a desire to make a more systematic inquiry. Reported in that paper are the results of a systematic survey of fourteen journals and eleven international relations readers which have been published over the past decade. The survey identified some 300 works on international organizations, 61 of which are based on quantitative analysis and field work. This study reports data obtained from coding these works on nine characteristics and provides examples of major findings. The purpose is to help the community of scholars engaged in this work to see where our collective activity is heading in the hope that this will enable us to make more effective use of the limited skills, time, and money available.