With numerous recent incidents in which law-enforcement officers played a role in the deaths of citizens, there is a renewed focus on cops and their actions. Part of that discussion is related to the nation’s preconceived notions of cops and where those ideas might originate. Popular culture contributes to those images; this study explores one source of those images: film. More specifically, it investigates the image of law enforcement on the silver screen from 1984 through 2014. With a sample of 34 films and more than 200 cop characters, this study finds a mixed general depiction of law enforcement in movies but a positive depiction of individual cop characters. The prevalent descriptor of those characters was good, hard-working, and competent law-enforcement officers. This exploratory study informs broader discussions about the images of cops found in popular culture.

A researcher’s “pipeline” refers to the progression of papers from the idea stage to the publication stage. Tenure-track faculty and graduate students often are advised that a busy pipeline is the way to tenure. However, beyond the simple encouragement to “work harder,” “write more,” and “publish more,” not much direction is given to junior scholars regarding how they should think about and manage their research pipeline. How does one develop a large number of papers from their first stages to the pages of respected journals? This article discusses the author’s system for pipeline management. The system works (1) by separating the difficult exercise of publishing a paper into eight manageable stages; and (2) by organizing a set of papers using these steps according to a practicable timeline.

As publishing demands increase, so does the availability of open access predatory publishing options masquerading as reputable peer-review outlets. This article cautions against the broader consequences of predatory publishing and suggests means to control their influence.

A number of scholars successfully modeled and predicted presidential nomination outcomes from 1996–2008. However, dramatic changes occurred in subsequent years that would seem to make replicating these results challenging at best. Building on those earlier studies, we utilize a series of OLS models that included measures of preprimary resources and early campaign successes or failures to forecast that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would win the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations in 2016. This outcome suggests that some fundamental factors governing nomination outcomes have not changed despite the conventional wisdom.

This article examines the ethics of crowdsourcing in social science research, with reference to my own experience using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. As these types of research tools become more common in scholarly work, we must acknowledge that many participants are not one-time respondents or even hobbyists. Many people work long hours completing surveys and other tasks for very low wages, relying on those incomes to meet their basic needs. I present my own experience of interviewing Mechanical Turk participants about their sources of income, and I offer recommendations to individual researchers, social science departments, and journal editors regarding the more ethical use of crowdsourcing.

The 2016 Republican Party presidential primary debates were unprecedented in the amount of media and public interest they generated. Substantially driven by curiosity about reality television celebrity Donald Trump, the initial debates hosted by FOX News and CNN both reflected and validated interest in his candidacy while proffering attention to a full slate of more traditional presidential contenders in front of boisterous audiences. This study considers these audiences’ response. Whether applause, laughter, booing, or combinations thereof, these group utterances provide a reliable metric by which insights may be derived concerning partisan attitudes towards Trump and the other candidates, as well as the unity of the Republican Party. Findings suggest that the debate setting in concert with the demographics of the in-person audience may well have influenced initial response to the candidates and as a result have subtle yet lingering consequences for the 2016 presidential election.

Data access and research transparency (DA-RT) is a growing concern for the discipline. Technological advances have greatly reduced the cost of sharing data, enabling full replication archives consisting of data and code to be shared on individual websites, as well as journal archives and institutional data repositories. But how do we ensure that scholars take advantage of these resources to share their replication archives? Moreover, are the costs of research transparency borne by individuals or by journals? This article assesses the impact of journal replication policies on data availability and finds that articles published in journals with mandatory provision policies are 24 times more likely to have replication materials available than articles those with no requirements.