How International Is Political Science? Patterns of Submission and Publication in the American Political Science Review

Abstract

How international in scope is publishing in political science? Previous studies have shown that the top journals primarily publish work by scholars from the United States and, to a lesser extent, other global-north countries. However, these studies used published content and could not evaluate the impact of the review process on the relative absence of international scholars in journals. This article evaluates patterns of submission and publication by US and international scholars for the American Political Science Review—one of the most selective peer-reviewed journals in the discipline. We found that scholars from the United States and other global-north countries are published approximately in proportion to submissions but that global-south scholars fare less well. We also found that scholars affiliated with prestigious universities are overrepresented, irrespective of geographic location. The article concludes with observations about the implications of these findings for efforts to internationalize the discipline.

Automated content analysis across six languages

“…Additionally, most computational linguistics programs only work with English-language data. This further limits the universe of cases from which researchers can generate corpora, of particular concern to scholars of international relations and comparative politics [7]. To address the issue of corpus bias, we introduce results that show that for many LIWC indices machine translation and human translation yield very similar results.…”

A Coauthorship Analysis of Internationalization in Political Psychology Through the Lens of ISPP Dissemination Activities

“…However, since at least 2004, APSA has had an International Committee responsive to calls by two successive APSA presidents for "'mutual de-parochialization' in our knowledge practices [through] … closer interaction between American and non-American political scientists" (Varshney, 2004). These efforts have been fruitful, with international (i.e., non-American) APSA membership rising from 10% in 2004 (Varshney, 2004) to about 25% in 2016 (Breuning et al, 2018). Thus, in comparison, the ISPP, with 66% of members from beyond North America, clearly has much more international participation.…”