Three decades of the International Political Science Review (IPSR): A map of the methodological preferences in IPSR articles

Where does the International Political Science Review (IPSR) stand in relation to the hierarchies of knowledge in the discipline? IPSR is the journal of the International Political Science Association and a well-established journal in the discipline of Political Science. The journal has been published since 1980 and in 2016 ranked 54 out of 163 journals in the field. Mapping IPSR’s profile can help us understand the changing thematic, epistemological and methodological preferences within the world of political science. This report maps the distribution of methodological techniques across 152 issues of IPSR, by analysing the abstracts of every article published between 1980 and 2015. In doing so, it aims to provide a clearer picture of the methodological approaches used by political scientists and endorsed by the political science community as acceptable scientific modes of knowledge making.