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

Abstract

We construct a co-authorship network of the global political science community. Two scientists are connected, if they have co-authored a paper. We draw on over 67,000 papers published 1990-2013 in one of today's 96 core journals. The network comprises over 40,000 authors located worldwide. We find that the community forms a single, interconnected component plus a large number of unconnected authors. While some are highly productive in terms of publications, the majority published just a single paper, suggesting a large amount of turnover in the community. Using information on the papers (e.g. title, journal, abstract), we trace out how different sub-communities organize and interconnect, how journals reach into the community and how individual scientists cooperate. We also investigate how the network has evolved during the last two decades. Our analysis is supplemented with a bibliographic nalysis that traces out major changes in publication patterns.