The Global Knowledge Flows of Political Research: Is All Politics G(local)?

• In Event: 540 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Knowledge Networks

Abstract

Academics hold the normative view that research ideas are generated independently of “place,” specifically the nation-state. What if this were incorrect? We argue that an author’s nation-state can describe much of the latent structure in research topics studied over time. Using techniques from computational linguistics, we apply the Partially Labeled Dirichlet Allocation (PLDA) technique to 60,000 political science papers from 1991 to 2011 present in the ISI Web of Science corpus to identify clusters of words uniquely associated with a nation-state. We are interested in characteristics that describe political, economic, and cultural differences between nation-states that might mirror how research topics flows between them. We identify styles of research by nation-state and study patterns of inter-state influence and referencing, as well as this structure’s change. Contrary to those arguing that globalization is fostering a more open, flatter, and interconnected global research community, nation-states are increasingly pursuing their own research agendas and are less dependent on the largest academic powerhouse, the United States. Physical proximity, as well as economic and colonial linkages, largely dictates research topic flows between countries.

Author

• Charles Jonathan Gomez, Stanford University