Under the Influence? Intellectual Exchange in Political Science

Abstract

We study the performance of political science journals in terms of their contribution to intellectual exchange in the discipline. Relying on the interplay of citation patterns, our method is simple, cheap, objective and captures the influence of journals in a meaningful way. We find that the American Political Science Review , World Politics and International Organization lead the field. In contrast to previous sub jective studies, we also find that economics is a key influence on political science, much more so than sociology.