Is Political Science Becoming More Pluralistic? A Bibliometric History

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Abstract

This paper examines the question of pluralism in political science historically and bibliometrically. While existing accounts have tended to focus on specific sub-disciplines or applied descriptive approaches, this paper utilizes large-scale bibliometric data and network analytical methods to systematically map the development of the entire discipline. Where existing bibliometric approaches tend to be limited to shorter time spans, this paper takes a wider historical perspective. Based on a novel data set comprising 347,736 research articles with 5,360,276 citations covering the time span of 1956-2019, the article studies the pluralism (or lack thereof) in Political Science journals on three main dimensions. First, it examines the pluralism (or lack thereof) in the intellectual ancestors of political science using Reference Year Publication Spectroscopy which examines the reference frequency of seminal works. Second, it visualizes the rise and fall of research agendas, subfields, interdisciplinary engagements, and methodologies over time through a combination of dynamic network analysis and unsupervised machine learning of journal and author co-citation patterns. Third, it examines the pluralism of political science research in terms of author characteristics in political science journals, notably gender and nationality.

Authors

• Mads Dagnis Jensen, Copenhagen Business School

• Snorre Sylvester Frid-Nielsen, Copenhagen University

• Peter Marcus Kristensen, University of Copenhagen