The COVID-19 virus scrambled the plans of social scientists whose research depends on field work, including many who use and reflexive methods. It became almost impossible to do research that depends on face-to-face interviews, personal interactions, and participant...
* I have changed the title as I got plenty of pushback on twitter--that there is plenty of IR on Pandemics, not just in the major journals. And I will add an update at the bottom later to address...
This is a guest post from Jeffrey C. Isaac and William Kindred Winecoff who both teach political science at Indiana University, Bloomington Last Wednesday the two of us circulated an open letter...
As the world rushes to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, international relations scholars have a lot to say. We are not public health experts, or pathologists. But we can speak to the way states...
With all of the recent essays on the Duck this summer about the job market, citation indexes, and lack of confidence, there seems to be a brewing undercurrent about the anxiety of another academic year. Some of us maybe facing down a PhD defense and the job market for the first time, some of us compiling our pre-tenure review files, and some of us just generally feeling uneasy about a new area of research or a class we’ve never taught. Some maybe anxious about a new job they’ve recently arrived at. I can feel the collective tension reading through the posts and their comments. I’d like to...
This is a guest post from Daniel Mügge who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam and the lead editor of the Review of International Political Economy. In two recent posts, Cullen Hendrix, and Daniel Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, have tabled important pros and cons of Google Scholar (GS) as a base for measuring of academic performance. And the flurry of reactions to their blogs reveal just how central and touchy and important an issue this is. The debate so far concentrates on gauging the "quality" of an individual scholar, and how different...
This is a guest post by both Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Standard disclaimers apply. Cullen Hendrix's guest post is a must read for anyone interested in citation metrics and international-relations scholarship. Among other things, Hendrix provides critical benchmark data for those interested in assessing performance using Google Scholar. We love the post, but we worry about an issue that it raises. Hendrix opens with a powerful analogy: sabermetrics is to baseball as the h-index is to academia. We can build better international-relations departments. With science! The main argument...
Policy schools prepare students to work in the public policy realm, most often training students for positions in government. But policymaking is an increasingly diverse field, policy issues span the globe and multiple--state and non-state--actors take part in decision-making and policy implementation. How should we teach global policy-making in policy schools? In a recent article co-authored with Cristina M. Balboa, Policymaking in the Global Context: Training Students to Build Effective Strategic Partnerships with Nongovernmental Organizations [ungated access here], we use a case study of...
The following is a guest post by Cullen Hendrix of the University of Denver. If you’ve read or seen Moneyball, the following anecdote will be familiar to you: Baseball is a complex sport requiring a diverse, often hard-to-quantify[1] skillset. Before the 2000s, baseball talent scouts relied heavily on a variety of heuristics marked by varying degrees of sanity: whether the player had a toned physique, whether the player had an attractive girlfriend, and whether or not the player seemed arrogant (this was seen as a good thing). Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics changed things with a...
In our last installment, I indicated that this edition of Gearing Yourself Up would include a discussion of how to put together your job market packet. I think I jumped-the-gun a bit, however. Before putting together your packet, before trying to log on to APSA and navigate eJobs, before telling your family/friends that you are looking for jobs in academia[1], you need to do one crucial thing: You need to have a heart-to-heart with your advisor(s). This might seem self-evident. However, I don’t think everyone gets this memo. I’m constantly amazed at the number of people who apply for...
Yesterday’s post Confidence and Gender in International Relations got me thinking. The post draws on the excellent survey data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at William and Mary’s Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations and notes that in the snap polls conducted by the project over the last year, women international relations scholars choose the response “I don’t know” more often than their male counterparts. They conclude that structural factors such as socialization might explain this “confidence gap” between female and male...
The following is a guest post by Rachel Merriman-Goldring, Susan Nelson, Hannah S. Petrie at William and Mary's Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations. For decades, survey research has suggested that women lack confidence in their answers, responding ‘don’t know’ or ‘maybe’ at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts. Initially, this trend on political surveys was attributed to topic-specific political knowledge gaps between men and women. However, recent research, including a study on the confidence gap between male and female economists,...