Written as a short personal reflection, this article explores the development of political science as an organized professional discipline in the United States. At its inception, political science in the United States was principally concerned with political thought and constitutionalism, and it was taught with the public-spirited purpose of educating for citizenship in a constitutional democracy. Twentieth-century methodological trends at one time threatened to remove political thought and constitutionalism from the curriculum of political science, but recent disciplinary trends suggest that American political thought does have a place in twenty-first-century political science.

Despite dynamic discussions of research methods within political science, there has been comparatively scarce attention paid to the possibility and effect of research-related trauma—the trauma experienced by individuals working on issues and data related to violence and death. There are many activities within the field of political science that put members of the profession directly at risk for this form of trauma. In this article, we draw attention to the possible risks of research-related trauma for scholars, graduate students, and research team members, and offer some recommendations for best practices in what can be a challenging discipline.

We evaluate hypotheses about human capital and structural theory-based predictors of variation in academic salaries. We use standard statistical models to explore differences in salary among full-time political science faculty, while also utilizing selection models to control for factors that place individuals on different trajectories stemming from their graduate school experience. We report on several findings, one of which is the positive effect on salary associated with graduation from a highly ranked PhD program; a second being the negative effect on salary of a high undergraduate teaching load. Other findings are that negotiation positively affects salary for men, but not for women, and that journal publications increase salaries amongst women, but not men. At the associate professor level, we find a significant gender gap in salary, even with controls for human capital, structural factors, and productivity. We also find a significant effect of race on the salaries of male faculty.

We constructed a co-authorship network of the global political science community. Two scientists are connected if they have co-authored a paper. We drew on more than 67,000 papers published from 1990 to 2013 in one of today’s 96 core journals. The network consists of more than 40,000 authors located worldwide. We found that the community forms a single, interconnected component as well as numerous unconnected authors. Whereas some are highly productive in terms of publications, the majority of authors published only a single paper, which suggests significant turnover in the community. Using information from the papers (e.g., title, journal, and abstract), we investigated how different subcommunities organize and interconnect, how journals reach out into the community, and how individual scientists cooperate. We also investigated how the network has evolved in the last two decades. Our analysis is supplemented by a bibliographic analysis that describes major changes in publication patterns.