Notes from the Editor

Extract

In this issue's Notes from the Editors, we are excited to be able to present not only our first big innovation for the American Political Science Review, our letter format, but also articles that are concurrent with present political affairs, a difficult task due to the intricacies of peer reviewed science. We would first like to draw attention to our new publication format, letters. We hope to further the idea of publishing important insights to research problems in political science and encourage scholarly debate in the discipline. Some of these insights, however, might not fit in the traditional, longer article format, which is tailored to original work advancing the understanding of political issues that are of general interest to the field of political science. Instead, letters provide an opportunity to report about original research that moves the subfields of political science forward as they develop alongside their counterparts in related disciplines, such as new theoretical perspectives, methodological progress, alternative empirical findings, as well as comments on and extensions of existing work. Moreover, our letter format attempts to increase inter-disciplinary recognition by broadening readership and eventually authorship from scholars of other disciplines that address an important research problem in political science.