Transparency of research is a large concern in political science, and the practice of publishing links to datasets and other online resources is one of the main methods by which political scientists promote transparency. But the method cannot work if the links don’t, and very often, they don’t. We show that most of the URLs ever published in the American Political Science Review no longer work as intended. The problem is severe in recent as well as in older articles; for example, more than one-fourth of links published in the APSR in 2013 were broken by the end of 2014. We conclude that “reference rot” limits the transparency and reproducibility of political science research. We also describe practices that scholars can adopt to combat the problem: when possible, they should archive data in trustworthy repositories, use links that incorporate persistent digital identifiers, and create archival versions of the webpages to which they link.

Striving better to uncover causal effects, political science is amid a revolution in micro-empirical research designs and experimental methods. This methodological development—although quite promising in delivering new findings and discovering the mechanisms that underlie previously known associations—raises new and unnerving ethical issues that have yet to be confronted by our profession. We believe that addressing these issues proactively by generating strong, internal norms of disciplinary regulation is preferable to reactive measures, which often come in the wake of public exposés and can lead to externally imposed regulations or centrally imposed internal policing.

In recent decades, instructors have increasingly adopted the use of “serious” games in their classrooms. Typically, these games take the form of role-playing simulations or wargames. However, online computer-run games have opened up new possibilities: to explore complex conceptual relationships, to utilize and display asymmetric information, to be playable anywhere and by anyone, and more. This article describes the game, Dark Networks, and shows why this type of game is valuable as well as how it has been used for pedagogical gains.

At a recent major political science conference, Tamara (not her real name) presented an in-depth qualitative study several years in the making, only to have the panelist speaking after her begin his remarks by saying, “And now back to the hard-core data.” By this, he meant quantitative, large-n data, which his work utilized. This moment highlights a series of tensions in our field relating to gender and methodology, and their effects, which this article explores and elucidates.

Human rights, ethnic conflict, democratization, colonialism, and development—many upper-level political science courses contain content that is understood differently across cultural contexts. Equipping students to appreciate diverse perspectives on these issues is a challenge that requires creative pedagogical strategies, regardless of whether all students come from the same region of the United States or the class has more than half international students. Professors in both environments have the complex task of guiding students to navigate disparate viewpoints. This article demonstrates the pedagogical potential of an integrated approach to student-led class modules based on a two-semester experiment using a Global Politics of Human Rights course at a small liberal arts college with a large population of international students. One section of the same course was taught in each semester with identical course material but with two different sets of student participants. After situating the challenges and the strategy within the growing literature on active learning, the article provides basic details of the pedagogical approach and three examples of the modules. It concludes with methods for assessing the effectiveness of student-led class modules.

Creative writing is not part of professional training in political science. Scholars in other fields, though, testify to the benefits of creative writing assignments, and my experiences teaching an undergraduate course on Politics and Literature suggest that there may be value in adding creative writing into certain political science courses. As with other forms of non-academic writing that political scientists identify as enriching, creative writing allows students to consider politics from multiple perspectives and expands their communicative powers. Working at the craft of storytelling—as opposed to abstract argumentation—can help students to think through key claims in contemporary political thought. Moreover, in this age of “alternative facts,” doing creative writing in a politics course may help students hone a critical skill of citizenship: thinking about the news in terms of narrative. In this essay, I consider the advantages and challenges of bringing creative writing into the study of politics.

Debates about presidential greatness have been with us for decades, facilitated in part by numerous systematic surveys of scholars with expertise in American history and politics. Nevertheless, the voice of political scientists in this debate has been relatively muted when compared particularly with the role that historians have had in making these determinations. This article introduces and assesses results of a recent effort to capture the attitudes of political science presidency experts about presidential greatness. By surveying the membership of the APSA Presidents and Executive Politics section, we could identify and then compare specifically the attitudes of political scientists against the growing body of ratings and rankings of a phenomenon with long-standing interest and importance.

Political science researchers have flexibility in how to analyze data, how to report data, and whether to report on data. A review of examples of reporting flexibility from the race and sex discrimination literature illustrates how research design choices can influence estimates and inferences. This reporting flexibility—coupled with the political imbalance among political scientists—creates the potential for political bias in reported political science estimates. These biases can be reduced or eliminated through preregistration and preacceptance, with researchers committing to a research design before completing data collection. Removing the potential for reporting flexibility can raise the credibility of political science research.

Zigerell (this issue) cites the findings of his recent reanalysis (Zigerell 2015) of the data in our 2013 study of the gender citation gap in the international relations literature to support his claim that our study showed a “preference for statistically-significant results.” We thank Zigerell for so closely engaging with our work. However, we note that he is focused on how his changes to our sample affect a single model in our original paper, highlight the fact that we reported statistically insignificant results when they arose in our original analyses, and review the findings of other recent re-analyses of our data. Ultimately, while we disagree with Zigerell’s conclusions about our work, we join Zigerell in calling for greater diversity in the discipline.

We propose a format for presenting experimental results that combines a graph’s strength in facilitating general-pattern recognition with a table’s strength in displaying numerical results. The format supplements a conventional bar graph with additional text labels and graphics but also can be based on a dot plot. The resulting enhanced bar graph conveys general patterns about treatment effects; displays point estimates and confidence intervals for all key quantities of interest relevant to testing hypotheses (e.g., first differences in the mean of the dependent variable); and clarifies the interpretation of these quantities as treatment effects. Presenting information in a single figure avoids the need to devote scarce journal space to both a graph and a table. Moreover, an enhanced bar graph prevents readers from having to move back and forth between a graph and a table of numerical results—thereby reducing their cognitive load and facilitating their understanding of the findings.