The Production and Placement of Political Science Ph.D.s, 1902–2000

Extract

This paper is the second of a three-part series dealing with quantitative indicators of impact and prominence in the political science discipline. In these essays, we assess some of the changes in the discipline since the publication of the Somit and Tanenhaus (1963; 1964; 1967) studies that cover the first 60 years of the twentieth century. In the first paper of the series, published in the January 2007 issue of PS (Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007), we focused on the individual visibility and impact of all regular faculty in Ph.D.-granting departments by using SSCI-based cumulative citation counts to their lifetime work. In particular, we identified the 400 most-cited faculty members in the discipline, and we found that citation counts are strongly influenced by factors such as date of Ph.D., subfield, and gender. This, the second paper in the series, shifts to departmental-level data and details the historical changes in Ph.D. production and placement rates from 1902–2000. The last paper in the series, to be published in the July 2007 issue of PS, will combine the individual-level citation data presented in the first paper with the Ph.D. production and placement data in the second paper to look at the factors that affect reputational rankings of Ph.D.-granting political science departments.The authors would like to thank Russell Dalton, Lee Sigelman, and the anonymous reviewers of PS for their helpful feedback and corrections. We are also indebted to the bibliographic assistance of Clover Behrend-Gethard and to the inspiration of Joe Tanenhaus' pioneering work. Any errors presented in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors welcome corrections to the data that is presented in this series. Comments and corrections can be sent to [email protected].