What was it like to have Kate McNamara a mentor?
Becoming and Living as a Happy Academic
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Wednesday Linkage
Editor's note: this post originally appeared on my personal blog. It contains some links to posts that appeared here at the Duck. 1. An interview with Jim Fearon about Ukraine. Lots of good stuff...
Academic Parenting 101: parental leave erosion
Academics are generally pretty lucky when it comes to parental leave- at least on paper. Many universities provide more leave than the minimum required by governments (so more than nothing in the...
Tuesday Linkage
Editor's note: this post previously appeared on my personal blog. I've been doing links posts on Tuesdays over there for a while now, so I guess I might as well start cross-listing them....
More academia Posts
New Page: Academia and Graduate School
I've put together a collection, albeit not a comprehensive one, of posts at the Duck of Minerva that focus on what might be called "the profession." The link is now a tab (Academia and Graduate School) below our banner.The rationale? Many of our most consistently popular pieces -- including ones that still get significant hits years after their publication -- fall into this category, so I think it might be a good service to try to consolidate links to them.In theory, post labels should do that, but after seven years of myriad bloggers our "labels" are a disaster. We have over a thousand;...
The Great Journal Impact Factor Race, Web 2.x, and the Evolution of the Academy
Back in May Robert Kelley touched off a discussion about Journal Citation Reports and impact factor rankings. Journal impact factor provides a textbook study in the consequences of a well-institutionalized but highly problematic quantitative measure. Impact factor is highly skewed, easily gamed, and somewhat arbitrary (two-year and five-year windows). Nonetheless, it drives a great deal of behavior on the part of authors, editors, and publishers.Impact factor, of course, is just one objective in the pursuit of prestige. Editors, boards, and associations want the status that comes with being...
Applying for a PhD in Political Science
I get a lot of emails asking for advice about putting together their graduate-school applications. I also get a lot of emails asking how to "improve" an application to make it "more competitive." I suspect that these emails come to me because I am Director of Admissions in the Government Department, and people assume that part of my job description is "helping them get into graduate school." Nonetheless, because I like to think of myself as a "nice person," I try to answer these queries with the sage advice that comes from many years on admissions committees. But it grows tiring to...
Academic IR and the Information Age: Journals
As my post on "open access" demonstrates, I've been thinking a lot about International Relations  journals over the last few months, particularly with respect to digital media. Charli's excellent presentation on the discipline and "web 2.0" fell at an interesting time for me, as I was working on a journal bid. My sense is that academic International Relations journals have a mixed record when it comes to fulfilling their varied functions in the field, and that better internet integration would help matters. This post seeks to make that case -- albeit in a very preliminary way -- but also...
When Political Scientists Do Not Understand Political Science
[cross-posted at SSSpew]When Political Scientists Do Not Understand Political Science .... they get published in the New York Times.I tried, I really tried, to ignore the screed at the NYT against political science (especially of the quant variety), but Jacqueline Stevens's rant is such a poor effort that I know it will be widely read and influential. Why? Because bad ideas often spread further and faster than good ones (see Clash of Civilizations).There are so many things wrong with this piece that it is hard to know where to start. First, I am , of course, much of what this women hates...
Open Access and IR Journals
Some time ago Thomas Rid had an amazing post arguing for an open-access revolution in our field. I won't repeat the arguments here; you can read them for yourself. The open-access movement is showing signs of momentum. Indeed, at BISA/ISA in Edinburgh, a number of people agitated for open access for the Review of International Studies (RIS) at its relaunch event.It seems that there are very few significant IR journals in a position to go open access. The obvious candidates would be journals associated with professional associations -- in addition to RIS, that would include the International...
Duck on a TRIP
The new TRIP survey is out. While the overall findings don't hold many surprises, there are some nuggets of interest. We'll have more to say later, but for now I want to call out a particular finding. Every survey asks the question "aside from you, please list four scholars who have produced the most interesting scholarship in the past five years." In some respects, this question functions as a proxy for "most influential," as the list:Is very similar to the one for "four scholars who have had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years"; and Contains a few people who,...
What Exactly is the Social Science Citation Index Anyway?
Yeah, I don’t really know either. I always hear the expression ‘SSCI’ thrown around as the gold standard for social science work. Administrators seem to love it, but where it comes from and how it gets compiled I don’t really understand. Given that we all seem to use this language and worry about impact factor all the time, I thought I would simply post the list of journals for IR ranked by impact factor (after the break).I don’t think I ever actually saw this list before all laid out completely. In grad school, I just had a vague idea that I was supposed to send my stuff to the same...