European universities in a global ranking of political science departments: a reply to bull and espíndola

Abstract

I would like to thank Markus Haverland, Martin Bull and Roberto Espindola as well as the numerous other people who have corresponded with me about my recent article in European Political Science and the accompanying article in Political Studies Review, on the ranking of political science departments. These comments usually raise one or more of the following criticisms about the method used: (1) that counting articles in journals is not an accurate reflection of political science research, either because the main output in political science is books or because any definition of the ‘top’ political science journals will necessarily produce an English language-biased metric; (2) that the method includes outputs by people who are not in political science departments, yet uses the number of staff in political science departments to calculate the volume of research per faculty member and the impact of research per faculty member; or (3) that my method of counting the number of faculty in political science departments is flawed. These are all valid criticisms. However, I would offer the following suggestions to improve my method. On the first issue, I would encourage others to develop a ranking based on book publications, using a similar combination of volume and impact measures. The two rankings could then be compared, and combined if they do not correlate. I am more concerned about the problem of the English language centricity of the method. This is difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to fix. However, the list of journals I coded is certainly not exhaustive, and I would encourage scholars in non English speaking countries to add the journals they read and publish in to the list, to code the institutional affiliation of authors in these journals, and to construct their own rankings from either a wider set of journals or a more relevant