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28 February 2006

More Journals?

Across the AAPOR discussion list comes an announcement of a new journal called Survey Research Methods. Published by the European Survey Research Association, the journal will deal with issues of "survey design, sample design, question and questionnaire design, data collection, nonresponse, data capture, data processing, coding and editing, measurement errors, imputation, weighting and survey data analysis methods." But aren't these matters already covered nicely by POQ, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, and other general journals such as AJPS? The only way it seems that the new SRM will differ is that it will be published on-line and can handle more interactive content. Personally, I'd rather that we put our scholarly efforts into elevating the journal Political Behavior to a more prominent place among journals. Let's hear your thoughts in the comment section.

Posted by Barry Burden at February 28, 2006 10:05 AM

Comments

I agree with Barry -- more journals are not the answer.

Survey methods should emulate the political methodologists and set up a list serve where individuals can post papers, job listings, and ask methodological questions. I think the survey research community is probably even more diverse than the political methodology community (which I think is quite diverse). Political scientists could talk to public health people or statisticians or folks in other disciplines who are working on survey research questions.

Maybe the Program on Survey Research at IQSS could start such a service?

Posted by: Andrew Reeves at February 28, 2006 9:45 PM

I disagree that more journals aren't needed, though I’m not sure this particular journal is needed. I think there are too few decent outlets in political science especially for papers that address issues of what I can only describe as basic science.

As it stands now the second tier American journals (e.g., APR, LSQ, PRQ, Pol Behavior, POQ and perhaps SSQ) have become quite selective because of a large number of submissions. The last I checked, APR had an acceptance rate of around 12%. Compare this to Comparative Politics which (last I checked had an acceptance rate of about 20%).

I may be way off base, but the problem I see is that papers I perceive as being of high enough quality but of narrow interest have a difficult time finding homes in decent places.

What type of work am I talking about? Well here are a couple of paper topics I suspect would have difficulty getting in to these journals:

Are states more heterogeneous than congressional districts?

Under what conditions does the presidential vote serve as an appropriate proxy for state or district preferences?

We have little evidence on many very basic empirical questions such as these, and my perception is that topics such as these would only have perhaps one reasonable home among the journals mentioned above.

Such journals could address other problems as well. One of the weaknesses in political science compared to other sciences is the small amount of space devoted to "real" replication (I contrast this to the re-computation we occasionally do). There is little incentive to try to replicate studies collecting original data because the payoff isn’t there as it is very hard to get such studies published.

The social sciences are much messier than the hard sciences, and as a consequence, we need to spend more time on these basic science type issues than they do, but instead we do less. I think part of this is a function of journal space.

Posted by: Ben Bishin at March 5, 2006 11:31 PM