This article explores publication patterns across 10 prominent political science journals, documenting a significant gender gap in publication rates for men and women. We present three broad findings. First, we find no evidence that the low percentage of female authors simply mirrors an overall low share of women in the profession. Instead, we find continued underrepresentation of women in many of the discipline’s top journals. Second, we find that women are not benefiting equally in a broad trend across the discipline toward coauthorship. Most published collaborative research in these journals emerges from all-male teams. Third, it appears that the methodological proclivities of the top journals do not fully reflect the kind of work that female scholars are more likely than men to publish in these journals. The underrepresentation of qualitative work in many journals is associated as well with an underrepresentation of female authors.

Open-access (OA) advocates have long promoted OA as an egalitarian alternative to traditional subscription-based academic publishing. The argument is simple: OA gives everyone access to high-quality research at no cost. In turn, this should benefit individual researchers by increasing the number of people reading and citing academic articles. As the OA movement gains traction in the academy, scholars are investing considerable research energy to determine whether there is an OA citation advantage—that is, does OA increase an article’s citation counts? Research indicates that it does. Scholars also explored patterns of gender bias in academic publishing and found that women are cited at lower rates in many disciplines. Indeed, in many disciplines, men enjoy a significant and positive gender citation effect (GCE) compared to their female colleagues. This article combines these research areas to determine whether the OA citation advantage varies by gender. Using Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) tests, the nonparametric analog to the independent samples T-test, I conclude that OA benefits male and female political scientists at similar rates. Thus, OA negates the gender citation advantage that typically accrues to male political scientists.

Gender diversity is good for the study of international relations (IR) and political science. Graduate training is an opportunity for scholars to affect the demographics of their field and the gendered practices within it. This article presents a first-cut investigation of the degree to which gender bias exists in graduate IR syllabi. The author found that the gender of the instructor for graduate courses matters significantly for what type of research is taught, in two ways. First, on average, female instructors assign significantly more research by female authors than male instructors. Second, women appear to be considerably more reluctant than men about assigning their own research as required readings. Some but not all of the difference between male- and female-taught courses might be explained by differences in course composition.

Women earn 40% of new PhDs in political science; however, once they enter the profession, they have strikingly different experiences than their male counterparts—particularly in the small but influential field of political methodology. For several years, the Society for Political Methodology, with support from the National Science Foundation, has attempted to address this gender gap through the Visions in Methodology (VIM) program. VIM features an annual conference that brings women together to present and discuss their research and to participate in professional-development sessions. Do programs like VIM have the desired impact? Using an original survey of political scientists, this study provides insights into the ways that bringing women together in small-group settings like VIM might facilitate networking and enhance productivity. In particular, the study finds that women who attend the VIM conference are better networked and more productive in terms of publication.

Despite some stakeholders’ concerns about the practical value of an undergraduate degree in political science, our graduates actually do quite well in the labor market. Based on analysis of a sample of 3.4 million college graduates (including 86,000 in political science) from the 2009–2014 American Community Surveys, our majors earn two-thirds more than demographically similar high school graduates if they stop with bachelor’s degrees, but they are among the most likely to obtain graduate degrees, especially in law. Only engineering, economics, computer science, and health science majors make at least 10% more than our graduates, who make nearly as much as those who major in business and 10% to 25% more than those who major in most other social sciences and humanities. Political science majors have relatively high unemployment rates in their 20s, however, and may end up in very different occupations than they imagined when they chose political science.

Despite the increasing urgency of many environmental problems, environmental politics remains at the margins of the discipline. Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project, this article identifies a puzzle: the majority of international relations (IR) scholars find climate change among the top three most important policy issues today, yet fewer than 4% identify the environment as their primary area of research. Moreover, environmental research is rarely published in top IR journals, although there has been a recent surge in work focused on climate change. The authors argue that greater attention to environmental issues—including those beyond climate change—in IR can bring significant benefits to the discipline, and they discuss three lines of research to correct this imbalance.

This study examines the scholarly practice of “knowledge sharing” and the extent to which it is rewarded by prevailing faculty-incentive structures. Following recent calls for greater connectivity between the academic and practitioner communities in both political science and public administration, there is a need for greater empirical evidence regarding the extent to which these practices are being employed across the discipline and how their use varies across institutional settings. Focusing on “knowledge sharing” as a specific dimension of “engaged scholarship,” this article reports the findings from a recent survey of public affairs and administration program leaders regarding current standards for earning tenure and promotion. Relevant scholarly practices are discussed and the reported value of these practices for earning tenure and promotion is presented. Institutional types are compared and recommendations are made for improving the dissemination of scholarly knowledge to the public administration practitioner community.