This issue of PS: Political Science & Politics includes a new feature: “From the Sections.” We announced this new content in our 2015 Editors’ Report:
We are creating a new subsection in “The Profession” called “News from the Sections.” Our intention in creating this section is to provide an outlet for the excellent content that has been appearing in many of the organized section newsletters and merit wider dissemination among our readership.
A letter to section heads calling for content for the new section was sent this Fall. We have been delighted with the enthusiastic response. This April issue includes the first two “From the Sections” articles. Each speaks to ongoing disciplinary debates regarding political science epistemology.
The first, by Nicholas Eubank, a PhD student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, describes his experiences managing the research replication process for the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. The article first appeared in the Political Methodologist for a special issue dedicated to issues of research reproducibility and replicability. Given the recent debates over DA-RT and journal policies, we cannot imagine a better time to reprint this piece.
The second is a significantly revised version of an article by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea on how political scientists need to actively engage with their institutional research board (IRB). The article does double duty, educating political scientists about the terminology and requirements of IRBs and providing pointed suggestions about how scholars can educate IRBs in a non-adversarial fashion about how political science research often differs from medical and psychological studies. The article previously appeared in the newsletter of the qualitative and multi-method research section of APSR, and briefer versions appeared in the Migration and Citizenship, Law and Courts, and Political Methodology newsletters.
Finally, this issue of PS includes two unique articles on mentoring by longtime APSA members, Gerhard Loewenberg of Cornell University and Daniel H. Levine of the University of Michigan. Both articles provide a set of personal reflections on how graduate training was conducted in an earlier era, and what lessons can be learned today. In addition, Loewenberg and Levine remind us of the excellent work of two political science scholars—Marco Einaudi and Kalman Silvert respectively—who may be well-known to many today, but whose work merits a revival.
In this issue, we are pleased to introduce a new organization of the table of contents. Content is now organized under four main sections: Politics (formerly Features), The Profession, The Teacher, and The Association. Symposia, under the editorship of Rob Hauck, have grown to be an important component of PS. We wish to now highlight them under the appropriate sub-heading. For example, this issue includes a Profession Symposium on the politics of IRBs.
With the exception of The Association, all contributions to the journal are the result of a blind peer-review process. This includes articles within Symposia, From the Sections, and Spotlight sections.
I hope that you agree that these changes allow the contents to be more easily organized and consumed. If you have any questions about the new organization, or comments about the PS more generally, I can be reached at cszymanski@apsanet.org.
