We demonstrate how men and women political scientists in PhD-granting departments perceive the professional climates there. We find remarkable differences in how men and women perceive the “cultural” climates of their departments, such as the degree to which it is sexist, but not in how they perceive strictly collegial aspects of climate. We also demonstrate that these patterns characterize the perceptions of men and women at both junior and senior ranks. Contrary to some past research, we also find that climate perceptions do not have a general effect on faculty research productivity. Further, perceptions of high departmental sexism by women scholars does not degrade their research productivity.

There is a severe mental health crisis among graduate students in political science. We present findings from an original survey on the mental health of political science PhD students at seven US universities. Our results are concerning: 15.8% expressed thoughts of suicide in the two weeks prior to taking the survey. About 30% of respondents met the criteria for depression and only a third of those were receiving treatment. Approximately 32% met the criteria for anxiety and fewer than half were receiving treatment. We also found that students with poorer mental health were more isolated, had fewer friends in their department and fewer people to turn to for help, and were more likely to contemplate dropping out of their program. Our study raises important questions about the experiences of graduate students during the PhD program and serves as an urgent call to action to address the well-being of our colleagues.

Has the pandemic exacerbated gender inequality in academia? We provide real- time evidence by analyzing 1.8 million tweets from approximately 3,000 political scientists, leveraging their use of social media for career advancement. Using automated text analysis and difference-in-differences estimation, we find that although faculty members of both genders were affected by the pandemic, the shift to remote work caused women to tweet less often than their male colleagues about professional accomplishments. We argue that these effects are driven by the increased familial obligations placed on women, as demonstrated by the increase in family-related tweets and the more pronounced effects among junior academics. Our evidence demonstrating the gendered shift in professional visibility during the pandemic provides the opportunity for proactive efforts to address disparities that otherwise may take years to manifest.

The relationship between digital technology and politics is an important phenomenon that remains poorly understood due to several structural problems. A key issue is the lack of adequate research infrastructures or the lack of access. This article discusses the challenges many social scientists face and presents the infrastructure we built in Switzerland to overcome them, using COVID-19 as an example. We conclude by discussing seven lessons we learned: automatization is key; avoid data hoarding; outsource some parts of the infrastructure but not others; focus on substantive questions; share data in the context of collaborations; engage in targeted public outreach; and collaboration is more promising than competition. We hope that our experience is helpful to other researchers pursuing similar goals.

The COVID-19 pandemic is hastening the shift of the world of work and study to online, remote, and flexible hours. The political science profession and its attributes of conferencing and workshopping will likely follow suit. To help direct this flow into relationships of reciprocity and scholarly co-creation, this article details the experiences of a successful online workshopping community known as the Normative Theory of Immigration Working Group (NTIWG). For the past 10 years, this voluntary association comprising 88 migration ethics scholars has been meeting routinely and exclusively online to workshop penultimate drafts of research papers. Three workshop conveners here reflect on the joys of group participation and mutual learning and listening. With the intention of smoothing the way for like-minded groups to emerge and solidify, we elaborate our group’s animating values and its learned-by-doing rules for scheduling, moderating, and offering feedback online. In the spirit of collectively facing the diversity and equity challenges confronting the future of political science, we conclude by reviewing steps that we are taking to address our own challenges of inclusivity.

In many political science journals, fewer than half of the invitations sent to potential reviewers are accepted. These low acceptance rates increase workloads for editors and lengthen the review process for authors. This article reports analyses of reviewer invitation acceptance at the Canadian Journal of Political Science between 2017 and 2020. We first describe predictors of invitation acceptance using a coded dataset of almost 1,500 invitations. We find that reviewers who are personally familiar to editors, located in the same country as the journal, and more junior scholars were more likely to accept invitations. We then report the results of an experiment that tested the effect of three letters on invitation acceptance. We find that a short personal note from the editor to accompany the auto-generated system message may increase reviewer acceptance rates but highlighting the journal’s prestige or reviewer recognition does not. We conclude by discussing the practical implications of our findings for editorial-team design and the editorial process.

Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describe five contributors that swell noun phrases: piled modifiers, needless words, nebulous nouns, missing prepositions, and buried verbs. We document more than a thousand examples and demonstrate how to revise each one with principles of style. We also draw on research in cognitive science to explain why these constructions confuse, mislead, and distract readers.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a shift to online academic meetings such as the webinar and virtual conference. We add to the conversation about how these modes of knowledge mobilization may be more inclusive, accessible, and environmentally friendly than in-person conferences through a discussion of the Twitter conference—during which participants produce threaded tweets of their research and engage in both real-time and asynchronous scholarly discussion. In this article, we discuss how to host a Twitter conference; we claim that Twitter conferences require different skills and have different strengths and weaknesses than virtual conferences or webinars; and we recommend that they should be a permanent addition to the roster of academic knowledge-mobilization events.

Many younger scholars have experience writing research articles and grant proposals but know relatively little about academic book publishing. Graduate training often provides little guidance to students regarding how to navigate the academic book-publishing process. This is unfortunate given that book publishing differs dramatically from publishing research articles. Drawing on the author’s own experiences and conversations with editors, this article provides concrete advise for first-time authors who hope to publish a scholarly book with a university press. The specific topics discussed include crafting proposals, finding appropriate presses, reaching out to editors, the peer-review process, securing and negotiating contracts, and production.

Political science research aims for greater transparency. Authors are increasingly expected to share their data and methodology so that readers and reviewers can follow their line of argument and replicate their findings. However, citations of books, articles, and other secondary sources in the discipline are still predominantly general, referring to entire works rather than specific parts of them. This article addresses the problem of the overuse of general citations as a disciplinary norm in political science. An analysis of articles published in five top-tier journals in 2019 reveals that only around 10% of the citations in these articles provide detailed source information (e.g., page numbers and location information) and identifies some of the causes for this scarcity. The article calls for more transparent citation norms in the discipline, suggests preliminary steps toward this goal, and proposes solutions for the challenges posed by the increasing use of digital sources.