A Global Ranking of Research Productivity of Political Science Departments

Abstract

This article provides a global ranking of research productivity of political science departments. We collected data on 115,427 articles and 12,696 books—written in both English and other languages—from 5,586 faculty members in 178 departments in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. Departments are ranked in terms of citations to articles published by faculty members, impact factors of journals in which they published, and number of top publications in which they published. Results are presented for overall and more recent research productivity.

Departmental rankings have become essential tools for evaluation in academia, aiding in the decision-making process for students and faculty members as well as governing bodies in charge of research funding and recruitment. In the United States, political science departments typically are rated by the US News & World Report’s survey-based rankings, which some criticize as being biased in favor of more reputed, established institutions over actual research productivity (Diermeier 2023). Globally, the QS World University Rankings in Politics provides a wider assessment by including both subjective survey responses and objective metrics such as citations and faculty ratios. However, this ranking also is criticized as overemphasizing peer perception with limited weight given to research output (see Huang 2012 for an overview of this debate).

Departmental rankings have become essential tools for evaluation in academia, aiding in the decision-making process for students and faculty members as well as governing bodies in charge of research funding and recruitment.

In response, recent efforts in political science have introduced more objective criteria (e.g., research productivity) to more accurately evaluate department performance in research. Garand, Qi, and Magaña (2023), for example, used three decades of data on publications from 19 leading political science journals, incorporating factors including authorship, department size, and journal impact to create a ranking of department research productivity. Peress (2019) provided a novel approach utilizing Google Scholar data to evaluate departments. His method ranked departments by their total as well as per-faculty outputs, including both cumulative and individual performance metrics of research productivity.

A key aspect of these rankings is their focus on political science departments located in the United States. Research, however, is an international affair; faculty members often collaborate with and work at multiple universities including those outside of the United States during their careers. Furthermore, research has become more global in recent decades, with the United States arguably losing its dominant position (National Science Foundation 2022). Thus, a study that explores the changing impact of departments across the globe is well warranted. What currently is needed in the discipline is an exercise that measures the research performance of political science departments based on a common, standardized set of metrics that can be applied throughout different regions. This study is valuable because it provides one of the first sets of objective rankings for departments both inside and outside of the United States to evaluate their research performance relative to others. ¹ By identifying outperforming departments and promoting them in the discipline, these metrics provide information sought by students, faculty members, and other scholars. They provide an evaluation tool that departments can use for university funding and external grants, which often require objective evidence of research excellence and influence among peers. These metrics also may be instrumental for faculty and student recruitment. Additional ranking exercises in this study allow us to assess the influence of US departments outside of the country, as evident in the inter-regional distribution of US-trained scholars and their impact in the discipline outside of the United States. Our findings suggest that there is continued dominance of these scholars in their departments outside of Europe and North America. Concurrently, there also is evidence of a shift over time toward a more balanced representation between European and North American universities among the top departments. This study contributes to the literature by building on the work of Garand, Qi, and Magaña (2023) and Peress (2019) and by extending it to provide a global ranking of political science departments.

What currently is needed in the discipline is an exercise that measures the research performance of political science departments based on a common, standardized set of metrics that can be applied throughout different regions.

SAMPLE AND DATA COLLECTION

We used the 2022 QS World University Rankings in Politics and selected its top 50 political science departments in each of the following six regions: North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. The QS Rankings lists 231 departments. Because only Europe and North America have more than 50 departments that made the list, we included all of the political science departments from the other regions. We supplemented the regional groups outside of North America with five additional political science departments in universities that operate as international campuses of home institutions, grant their own bachelor’s degrees, and have more than five standing faculty members. ² These international campuses embody an emerging trend in higher education in which major universities—especially those based in the United States—open campuses abroad, drawing international students and faculty members and offering standardized curricula aligned with Western standards. In total, this study encompasses 178 departments across 45 countries, providing a global perspective of political science academia. Figure 1 is an illustration of the countries that are represented in the sample by at least one department.

Figure 1 Countries in the Sample

Note: Country coverage of study sample equals “yes” when one or more political science departments are located in a country.

Between November 2022 and June 2023, we manually listed all faculty members in each department and recorded their PhD conferral years. Subsequently, we compiled all publications—in both English and other languages—for these faculty members by carefully implementing the following procedures. First, we manually recorded publication records from each faculty member’s website (personal or departmental), including CV if it was available. Second, we searched for the faculty member’s most up-to-date CV from other websites, including the search term in Google (“faculty’s full name” CV). Third, when available, we used the faculty member’s Google Scholar profile page. Fourth, we queried Google Scholar with the name of the faculty member in quotation marks and then used the results from the first 20 pages where the faculty member’s name matched Google-listed authored publications. ³

For the next step and for all publications, we manually recorded the title, year, and journal (or the press for books) in which the publication appeared and the number of coauthors. We also added citation counts for each publication. To do so, we scraped the number of citations from each faculty member’s Google Scholar webpage. ⁴ Finally, we sourced the Journal Citation Report—the 2022 dataset provides information about 21,430 academic journals from 114 countries—to add, where available, impact scores for each publication’s journal.

The final dataset, which is publicly available, includes detailed information on 115,427 articles and 12,696 books from 5,586 faculty members in 178 departments across the globe (Barceló et al. 2024). More than 75% of all publications in our dataset are in English. ⁵ Online appendix A provides the coding protocol, and online appendix B describes the manual checks that we implemented to ensure data quality.

MEASURING RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY

Our research productivity measures built on the metrics introduced in previous studies. Specifically, we present the three measures used in Peress (2019). First, we calculated the total number of citations of all of the faculty member’s publications. Second, we calculated the total of the current five-year impact factors of all of the journals in which each faculty member’s publications appeared. The third measure was based on publications in top journals. We followed Peress (2019) and counted American Political Science Review (APSR), American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Organization, and World Politics as top journals, with APSR articles receiving twice the weight.

In addition, Peress (2019) provided a fourth measure, which is the total number of citations strictly based on the articles published during the most recent five-year period. We followed this approach for all three metrics (i.e., citations, impact, and top publications) limited to the most recent five-year window (i.e., 2018–2022).

RESULTS

Table 1 lists the top 10 departments by region (or fewer in the case of regions with fewer than 10 departments that made the QS Rankings) using the department-level aggregate performance measures. ⁶ The departments that ranked in the top 10 across all six indicators were Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University, and Princeton University in North America; London School of Economics (LSE), Aarhus University, and Copenhagen University in Europe; Hebrew University, University of Hong Kong, and New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi in Asia; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC Chile) and Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico (ITAM) in Latin America; and Australian National University, Griffith University, and Monash University in Oceania. ⁷

Table 1 Top 10 Political Science Departments by Region

Notes: Top 10 departments by department totals under six performance metrics. For each metric, we ranked only those departments that scored above zero. “Recent” refers to the period 2018–2022. Departments that tie (indicated by *) were selected randomly for the table until No. 10. Ties for Asia “Recent Top Publications”: Tsinghua University, Osaka University, Seoul National University, and Duke Kunshan University.

Online appendix C presents the global rankings, listing all universities together. We observed on this list that North American departments dominate in terms of the total number of citations. ⁸ LSE is the only non-American department to make the global top 20 (as No. 19). Also, regarding top publications, all top 20 departments are located in the United States. European universities were more competitive under the total impact-factor metric, with seven departments placed in the top 20; Aarhus University, in fact, leads the global list. Departments outside of Europe and North America, conversely, lag behind across all department-level metrics. The top departments outside of North America and Europe were University of Sydney, which ranked 59th in citations; University of New South Wales Sydney, which ranked 43rd in impact; and NYU Abu Dhabi, which ranked 51st based on top publications. Comparing total citations, journal impact, and top publications with their recent counterparts (i.e., the same metrics except based only on the years between 2018 and 2022) suggests a trend. We found a shift toward a more balanced representation between European and North American universities. In terms of recent citations, seven departments in the top 20 were not based in North America: Aarhus University, University of Gothenburg, LSE, University of Amsterdam, King’s College London (KCL), Uppsala University, and University College London (UCL). Their recent-citations rankings also were above their positions under the total citations ranking. The recent-impact metric underscores this upward trend for European universities compared to their North American counterparts, with half of the top 20 composed of European departments. Aarhus University leads this category. Other European departments—UCL, LSE, KCL, Essex University, University of Gothenburg, University of Amsterdam, Copenhagen University, University of Oxford, and Exeter University—not only ranked in the top 20 but also performed better than their total impact metric, which suggests a positive trajectory. Finally, European universities also performed better under the recent-top-publications metric. Whereas all of the departments in the top 20 under the total top publication count were located in the United States, five European departments—Aarhus University, LSE, UCL, University of Oxford, and Essex University—made the top 20 list when we focused solely on more-recent top publications. In summary, if this trend continues, European departments likely will take higher positions in the ranking of top publications in the future.

Ranking by Faculty-Level Research Productivity

Department-level performance metrics are influenced by faculty size. Table 2 presents the same information as table 1 but accounts for the number of faculty members in each department (online appendix C presents all universities together). We found that the departments that consistently ranked in the top 10 across the six per-faculty indicators were Stanford University, Columbia University, and NYU in North America; Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, University of Zürich, and University of Mannheim in Europe; Hebrew University and NYU Abu Dhabi in Asia; UC Chile and ITAM in Latin America; and Australian National University, Monash University, and Griffith University in Oceania.

Table 2 Top 10 Political Science Departments per Faculty Member by Region

Notes: Top 10 departments by region under six performance metrics, faculty averages. For each metric, we ranked only those departments that scored above zero. “Recent” refers to the period 2018–2022.

The departments that consistently ranked in the top 10 of their respective regions across all metrics in both overall and per-faculty rankings were Stanford University and Columbia University in North America; Hebrew University and NYU Abu Dhabi in Asia; UC Chile and ITAM in Latin America; and Australian National University, Monash University, and Griffith University in Oceania. That is, we found that no political science department in Europe consistently ranked in the top 10 in the region under both the department-level and per-faculty metrics. European departments thus ranked highly because they were either large departments producing high volumes of impactful research (e.g., Aarhus University, LSE, Copenhagen University, and University of Oxford) or smaller teams of prolific scholars (e.g., ETH Zürich, University of Zürich, and Mannheim). ⁹

North American universities consistently occupied the top rankings in all overall per-faculty metrics rankings, with European institutions following and other regions lagging behind (see online appendix C). However, we also found evidence of a shift over time toward a more balanced representation between European and North American universities. In overall citations, three European universities were in the top 20 (i.e., ETH Zürich, European University Institute, and Utrecht University). For overall impact, five European departments made the top 20 (i.e., ETH Zürich, Mannheim University, Katholieke Universiteit [KU] Leuven, Humboldt University, and Aarhus University). ETH Zürich was the only European department in the top 20 for overall top publications. European political science departments scored better when based on recent publications between 2018 and 2022. Five European universities (i.e., ETH Zürich, Utrecht University, KU Leuven, University of Zürich, and Aarhus University) and one Latin American university (i.e., Diego Portales University) entered the top 20 list under the recent per-faculty citations metric. In the recent impact per-faculty metric, seven European institutions and one Asian institution (i.e., NYU Abu Dhabi) made the global top 20. For the recent top publications per-faculty metric, three European institutions—Humboldt University, ETH Zürich, and Mannheim University—as well as NYU Abu Dhabi were ranked in the top 20. In summary, universities outside of North America, especially those in Europe, are gaining more prominence in the discipline over time, as evidenced by their impact from 2018 to 2022 relative to their historical impact.

Global Top Scholars in Political Science

Table 3 presents the top 10 political science scholars by research performance within their respective region (i.e., the location of the department with which the faculty member is affiliated). The table also provides information on the location of their PhD conferral. ¹⁰ Our list of scholars in North America aligns closely with those from other studies, despite deviations resulting from our distinct inclusion criteria (Kim and Grofman 2019; Peress 2019). ¹¹ For example, Andrew Gelman, who ranked as the most-cited scholar in our dataset, did not appear on these other lists. Seven scholars featured in our North American top 10, conversely, were among the top 20 most-cited according to Peress (2019) and the top 100 according to Kim and Grofman (2019). Under the total-impact metric, table 3 reveals that James Fowler published works with the highest impact, followed by Gary King, Christopher Adolph, and Jens Hainmueller. Overall, our list diverges from that of Peress (2019) because we did not limit our impact metrics exclusively to political science publications. Therefore, interdisciplinary scholars and those with a broad network of collaborations tended to dominate this ranking. Finally, table 3 shows a strong consistency with the Peress (2019) list of scholars with the largest volume of top publications. In fact, each scholar listed in our top 10 for most top publications in North America also was found in the Peress compilation of the top 20 scholars. James Gibson led our rankings as well, coinciding with the Peress (2019) findings; Gregory Caldeira, Gary King, and Robert Erikson also featured prominently, albeit ranked differently. ¹²

Table 3 Top 10 Political Science Scholars by Region

Notes: Top 10 political science scholars by region under six performance measures. Faculty members with a zero score in any metric were excluded from ranking altogether. ^ = best guess of PhD origin based on current affiliation and historical publication records, in the absence of direct information available online. “Recent” refers to the period 2018–2022. Individuals that tie (indicated by *) were selected randomly for the table until No. 10. Randomly omitted from Asia “Top Publications”: Chi Huang (National Chengchi University), Chung Hun (Waseda University), Aaron Kaufman (NYU Abu Dhabi), Haillie Na-Kyung Lee (Seoul National University), Phillip Y. Lipsey (Tokyo University), Tetsuya Matsubayashi (Osaka University), Woo Sang Kim (Yonsei University), Giuliana Pardelli (NYU Abu Dhabi), Jeffrey F. Timmons (NYU Abu Dhabi), and Jason Todd (Duke Kunshan University); all with [NA]. Omitted from Europe “Recent Citations”: Sara Hobolt (LSE) [EU]. Omitted from North America “Recent Top Publications”: Robert Blair (Brown University), Alexander Coppock (Yale University), Kosuke Imai (Harvard University), Vladimir Kogan (Ohio State University), Tamar Mitts (Columbia University), and Nikhar Gaikwad (Columbia University); all with [NA]. Omitted from Europe “Recent Top Publications”: Martin Vinæs Larsen (Aarhus University) [EU], Gabor Simonovits (Central European University) [NA], and Elias Dinas (EUI) [EU]. Omitted from Asia “Recent Top Publications”: Aaron Kaufman (NYU Abu Dhabi) [NA]. Omitted from Oceania “Recent Top Publications”: Jill Sheppard (Australian National University) [OC]. Omitted from Latin America “Recent Top Publications”: Miguel Garcia Sanchez (Los Andes) [NA], Eric Magar Meurs (ITAM) [NA], and Stefano Palestini (UC Chile) [NA].

Comparing across regions, top North America–based scholars led in citations and top publications, outpacing the top scholars in Europe and other regions. For instance, Ole Wæver from the University of Copenhagen—the most-cited scholar at an institution outside of North America—would not rank among the top 10 most-cited scholars globally and would fall short by a substantial margin of 13,000 citations. Similarly, Lars-Erik Cederman from ETH Zürich, who had the most top publications outside of North America, falls short by 10 top publications compared to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the 10th most-published scholar in the leading political science journals. In contrast, regarding impact, Thomas Bernauer, also from ETH Zürich, holds the highest aggregated journal impact outside of North America and would place fifth globally under this metric.

Table 3 shows that there were strong regional affiliations found in North America and Europe. In North America, all scholars who made the list—across all six metrics—received their PhD in North America. The case was similar albeit weaker for scholars in Europe; about two thirds of top Europe-based scholars obtained their PhD in Europe (and about one third in North America). None of the top scholars in Europe and North America obtained their PhD outside of these two regions. This was different for political science departments located outside of Europe and North America, where only a minority of top scholars obtained their PhD from the same region in which they were based. In Latin America, about one third of the top scholars obtained their PhD in Latin America. This proportion decreased to two in 10 for Oceania and Africa and to one in 10 for top scholars based in Asia. The top scholars in these regions obtained their PhD mostly in North America: about seven of 10 in Asia, six of 10 in Latin America, and four of 10 in Oceania and Africa.

Another observation is highlighted in table 3. Focusing solely on the top publications metrics, whether overall or recent, there was no scholar with a PhD from outside of North America or Europe who ranked in the top 10 of their region. In other words, only scholars with a North American or European PhD published in top political science journals. This was expected because the top five journals considered in our dataset are all based in the United States. The ability to publish in these journals inevitably reflects, at least in part, on the scholar’s training as a Western academic, including the absence of a language barrier, but also may result from the fact that researchers with a North American or European PhD have greater representation on editorial boards of top journals.

CONCLUSION

Recent efforts to measure research productivity of political science departments in the United States endeavored to implement objective criteria in ranking, such as faculty members’ citation counts, journal impact, and top journal publications (Garand, Qi, and Magaña 2023; Peress 2019). Our study broadens this effort and undertakes a similar ranking exercise to the global level, extending the scope of coverage to political science departments in Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, Latin America, and North America. The main findings suggest that publishing in political science is dominated by departments in North America (and by scholars who obtain their PhD there) and, to a lesser extent, those in Europe. This observation also has been found in other fields of research (see Bol et al. 2023 for public health).

We also note that whereas the top-ranked departments in the United States (e.g., Harvard University, Columbia University, and Stanford University) appear consistently in both the QS Rankings and our rankings as top 10s, there are significant discrepancies between the two ranking exercises concerning highly ranked European departments. In our exercise, European departments also changed significantly in their ranking depending on the metrics used—that is, department-total metrics versus faculty-average metrics. For example, when we reviewed the department-total performance (see online appendix table A2), neither University of Oxford nor Cambridge University made the top 10 in our global rankings based on research productivity, although the two departments were ranked No. 2 and No. 8, respectively, in the 2022 QS Rankings. The Paris Institute of Political Studies is another exception; its department was ranked outside of the top 30 under every metric in our ranking but was No. 3 in the QS Rankings. Conversely, Aarhus University, the top department in our rankings (under the total-impact metric), was No. 48 in the QS Rankings. Because the QS Rankings includes peer-based department reputation as a factor, some of the older, more established departments in Europe likely have ranked higher accordingly.

Aarhus University’s stellar performance relative to other departments may be driven by the size of the department. When we accounted for the size factor and considered the faculty-average instead, there were noticeable ranking changes among European departments that were missing in the QS Rankings. ETH Zürich was ranked as the top department globally under the total-impact, recent-citations, and recent-impact metrics; other departments—including Mannheim University, Humboldt University, Utrecht University, EUI, and KU Leuven made the global top 10 lists under one or more of the six performance measures (see online appendix table A3). None of these departments made the top 10 list in the QS Rankings.

Our data suggest an emerging trend toward increased geographic diversity in a new generation of research output, revealing a movement toward a more balanced representation between North American and European departments, as well as an increase in contributions from academic centers in non-Western countries. Although this trend seems encouraging, some scholars may argue that this observation is less about increased diversity in research production and more indicative of an expansion of US global influence. As universities place more emphasis on their ranking with respect to other institutions globally, scholars outside of the United States may be increasingly pressured by their own department to publish in US-based political science journals. The establishment of international campuses of US-based institutions also means promotion not only of US-based course curricula but also faculty and scholarship according to Western standards. Moreover, another reason for the apparent geographic diversity of research output may be related to researcher mobility. The challenging academic job market for political scientists in the United States during the past decade has led to a diaspora of US-trained academics who are seeking opportunities abroad—including in countries such as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Singapore, and China—to institutions that had less access to these scholars when the job market was more favorable. Because scholars from the dominant academic core—North America and Europe—remain responsible for building the majority of political science knowledge and their focus on Western scholarship continues to dominate, there are likely to be few contributions by scholars from non-Western regions, especially those who focus on underexplored regions and/or countries for their research.

Our data suggest an emerging trend toward increased geographic diversity in the generation of research output, revealing a movement toward a more balanced representation between North American and European departments, as well as an increase in contributions from academic centers in non-Western countries.