Aims and Scope

Political Science Research and Methods (PSRM) is a general political science journal dedicated to publishing original scholarly work of the highest quality from all subfields of political science. The journal specifically focuses on research applying rigorous methods to empirical or theoretical problems and promotes a rigorous scientific approach to the study of politics. PSRM welcomes work at the intersection of political science and related disciplines such as economics and sociology.

PSRM is the official journal of the European Political Science Association (EPSA) and strives to become one of the leading journals in Political Science.

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article*
• Research Note*
• Replication*
• Comment**

* All or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. For authors not covered by an agreement, and without APC funding, please see this journal's open access options for instructions on how to request an APC waiver. 

** No APCs are required for these article types.

Research articles will be full length manuscripts that present original, well researched and fully developed empirical or theoretical work. Research articles should not exceed 9,000 words in length, including tables, figures, footnotes, references and appendices, but excluding any supporting material that can be relegated to an online appendix.

Research notes should contain original work and present a new method or methodology (particularly useful if related software components are included) to solve an important problem in applied data analysis, present a new theoretical idea or argument, or comment on other articles published in the journal. Research notes should not exceed 4,000 words in length, including tables, figures, footnotes, references and appendices, but excluding any supporting material that can be relegated to an online appendix.

We request that you seek to make your article as concise as possible, relegating possible robustness checks, tables and figures to an online appendix. The managing editor will request reducing the length of a manuscript as appropriate and dictated by publication constraints.

PSRM also welcomes comments, as well as replications of published articles. PSRM comments include both brief commentary on articles published in PSRM and reanalyses of the data central to other published work leading to divergent findings. PSRM may invite the original author(s) to respond to the comment. PSRM replications are investigations mirroring the procedures of a prior study using different data.  Both comments and replications will undergo the usual peer review process and if accepted will be published in the research notes section of the journal.

You can access the PSRM Overleaf template here. There is a direct link to submit your manuscript from within the Overleaf authoring environment.  Once you have completed writing your article, please use the "Submit to Journal" button and select the link for PSRM to be directed to the journal's submission system.

Preparing your article for submission

1. Every manuscript should include an abstract which should not exceed 120 words in length.

2. Manuscripts should be initially submitted as MS Word, LaTeX or PDF files.

3. Files submitted in LaTeX should use the PSRM LaTeX template available to download from the Author Dashboard in ScholarOne Manuscripts: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/psrm. Alternatively, authors can use the PSRM template in Overleaf. The submission should clearly state the corresponding author.

4. Manuscripts need to effectively and informatively state their contribution and communicate it to a general political science audience.

5. Manuscripts should not include a lengthy discussion of previous literature but should clearly identify a gap in this literature and state the original contribution.

6. Initial submission should be in a format that makes the job of the reviewer as easy as possible. Tables and Figures should be included in the main text rather than at the end of the document. Contributions should be double spaced, although footnotes and captions for tables and figures may be single-spaced. Appendices should be double spaced. Fonts should be no smaller than 12pt with reasonable margins. All pages should be numbered. While strictly adhering to the 9,000 word maximum is not required for initial submissions, excessively long manuscripts might be sent back to the corresponding author prior to review. Manuscripts should use footnotes at the bottom of each page instead of endnotes.

7. Spelling should be American English. Particularly if English is not the first language of the authors, authors may wish to have the manuscript language edited before submission. This is not mandatory but might help to enhance understandability for editors and reviewers. Authors should use a gender neutral language.

8. Tables: Tables should be as clear as possible and preferably designed by the table editor in Word or typeset in LaTeX. The full LaTeX style file can be found at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/psrm.

9. Tables should be numbered consecutively throughout the manuscript. Numbers (e.g. coefficients and standard errors from statistical analysis) in tables should be reported with no more precision that substantively meaningful and should not exceed 3 digits to the right of the decimal point. If appropriate, variables should be rescaled to be able to report a uniform number of digits. Tables should be labelled or annotated in a way that makes the table content understandable without reading the main text.

10. Figures: Whenever possible, figures should replace tables if the same information can be conveyed in a graphical manner. All Figures need to be embedded in the electronic file. Figures should be numbered consecutively and placed in the main text. Figures should be labelled as clearly as possible and the information needs to be interpretable without reading the main text. Authors should avoid figures using shaded outer margins and figures using colours other than greyscale, e.g. instead of different colours, lines can be distinguished with different patterns.

11. Equations: Equations and formulas are important for the presentation of formal and statistical arguments. Authors should make the mathematical presentation as clear as possible. Clear and consistent notation and formatting of equations should be used. All symbols used in equations need to be clearly defined. To ensure readability of the paper, authors should choose a notation that makes the argument as easy to follow as possible. Equations are part of the text and thus they should contain appropriate punctuation. Equations should be numbered consecutively, with subnumbering used as appropriate, e.g. equations 1a and 1b.

12. Quotations should be clearly marked by double quotes and appropriately referenced.

13. Style: PSRM uses the Chicago Manual of Style, 15^th edition, for citations and references:

• Books are referenced as: Author, Alan B. 1999. Title. City, State or country: Publisher.
• Articles are referenced as: Author, Alan B., and Charles D. Author. 1999. Title. Journal title 1(2):217-355.
• For references with ten authors or fewer, all should be listed; for references with eleven or more, only the first seven should be listed, followed by "et al." (et al. is italicized).

For LaTeX and BibTeX users: the harvard or natbib packages work well. Users of harvard should use the apsr option. All users of BibTeX should use the chicago.bst bibliography style.

While style formatting is only relevant after an article has been accepted, authors can simplify matters by following above guidelines as they begin writing.

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

For further guidance on how to prepare your Abstracts and Keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

PSRM Data Replication Policy

PSRM has a strict replication policy which adheres to the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) statement subscribed to by many Political Science Journal Editors in 2015. Authors are required to make replication material publicly available at time of publication of the article. The replication materials must be sufficient to replicate results in all tables and figures printed in the article and in the online appendix, including simulation material for both theoretical (e.g. agent based models) and empirical (e.g. Monte Carlo experiments) work. 

Data and replication code for your article, as well as a log demonstrating smooth running of all the replication files, must be uploaded in a single .zip file to the PSRM Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/PSRM. (See the PSRM Dataverse Guide for a step-by-step walkthrough for uploading your material, which is also linked to on the PSRM Dataverse homepage). This is a necessary condition for publication of the manuscript. All manuscripts are accepted contingent on their replicability, which will initially be assessed by PSRM staff. Manuscripts that are not replicable will be declined for publication. If your analysis relies on simulation techniques (MCMC, MC experiments) we require authors to set and communicate a seed, so that exact results can be replicated. If this is impossible due to the design of the analysis, replication results need not deviate by more than 5 per cent from published results in the manuscript.

Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance for more information about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated. 

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

• to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s).
• to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
• to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript.
• must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission.

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.

Acknowledgements

Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organisers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that that any type of funding information or financial support is listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can be recorded separately (see Funding statement above).

We are aware that authors sometimes receive assistance from technical writers, language editors, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication. Such assistance must be noted in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section, along with a declaration that the author(s) are entirely responsible for the scientific content of the paper and that the paper adheres to the journal’s authorship policy. Failure to acknowledge assistance from technical writers, language editors, AI tools and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section may lead to the disqualification of a submitted paper under review, or the correction or retraction of a published paper. Examples of how to acknowledge assistance in drafting manuscripts:

• “The author(s) thank [name and qualifications] of [company, city, country] for providing [medical/technical/language] writing support/editorial support [specify and/or expand as appropriate], which was funded by [sponsor, city, country]."
• “The author(s) made use of [AI system/tool] to assist with the drafting of this article. [AI version details] was accessed/obtained from [source details] and used with/without modification [specify and/or expand as appropriate] on [date(s)].