Graduate Training and Productivity: A Look at who Publishes

Abstract

In two recent studies, Morgan and Fitzgerald and Robey ranked American political science departments on the basis of their faculty's research productivity in the major political science journals. The rankings which they produced were at some variance with the reputational rankings reported by Somit and Tanenhaus, Cartter, and, more recently, Ladd and Lipset. In particular, Robey reports that "… some southern universities seem to have made great strides in the last ten years while some Ivy League schools do not seem to be producing at a rate equivalent with their reputations. " Morgan and Fitzgerald reach a similar conclusion about the relationship between reputation and productivity for the Ivy League and southern schools. These studies and their implications have generated a great deal of discussion among political scientists and, as might be expected, have been subjected to a variety of criticism. Criticisms, for example, have focused on the journals selected to measure productivity, the use of frequency of articles produced rather than their importance for the profession, and the failure to incorporate books and monographs in such evaluations. Disciplines

Faculty Research Productivity: Why Do Some of Our Colleagues Publish More than Others?

“…An extensive bibliography on the topic is available from the authors upon request. ell 1998;Garand and Graddy 1999;McCormick and Bernick 1982;McCormick and Rice 2001;Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996).…”

A bibliometric evaluation of the research performance of British university politics departments: Publications in leading journals

“…23 In other cases restricted journal sets have been defined as a select number of supposedly 'reputable' journals. 24 Neither of these approaches is entirely satisfactory; they are either arbitrary or subjective and do not guarantee that the restricted journal sets consist of the journals of the highest possible quality. To optimize the choice of journals for the research described below, the restricted set was defined as the European journals of politics with the highest mean citations per published article, otherwise known as citation impact.…”

“…It was applied initially to university departments of psychology 18 but has also been applied to university departments of politics. 19 Its use in Britain has been limited to two studies of university psychology departments. 20 The research reported in this article represents a modest attempt to extend the technique to British university departments of politics.…”

Graduate Training, Current Affiliation and Publishing Books in Political Science

“…One of the central responsibilities of a doctoral program is to train students to do high-quality original research, and the best way to determine the extent to which programs succeed in this endeavor is to measure the productivity of their graduates. McCormick and Bernick (1982) Both of these studies were well received, but both were criticized for concentrating on journal publications at the exclusion of books. Many scholars felt, perhaps rightly, that schools differed in their research philosophies, with some stressing journal publications and others emphasizing books.…”