2016/02/12 by Jeff D. Colgan · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #International Relations and Foreign Policy #Political Conflict and Governance #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Disadvantage #Incentive #Face (sociological concept) #Politics #Field (mathematics) #Graduate students #International relations #State (computer science) #Metric (unit) #Political science #Transferability #Public relations #Sociology #Positive economics #Social science #Law #Pedagogy #Economics #Computer science #Marketing #Business
paper · doi:10.1093/isq/sqv017
openalex publication_date 2016/02/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Recent debates about the state of International Relations (IR) raise the possibility that the field is losing its theoretical innovativeness due to professional incentives to churn out publications. Yet the claims made about IR far outstrip the availability of empirical data. Important assertions derive from a handful of examples rather than systematic evidence. This paper presents an investigation of what gets taught to doctoral students of IR in the United States. I find, among other things, that the type of research most frequently published in IR journals differs in systematic ways from the type of research taught to graduate students. In turn, this raises important questions such as whether certain types of valuable research face a relative disadvantage when it comes to getting published in the first place. The evidence also points to the partial separation of IR from Political Science in the United States. Further, it casts doubt on the growing practice of using Google Scholar to measure research influence. A new metric, which I call the Training Influence Score (TIS), supports the analysis.