Basic information on the data

There were altogether 740 assistant professors in my sample. I am missing some (e.g. the whole department of University of New Orleans as their website was down when I compiled this). In some instances, I had to make judgment calls (when to include people who are affiliated with the political science department but not really there - I am not sure I was quite consistent in doing this; mostly these people were not included, but with some double appointments I just did not know). Only assistant professors are included, thus associates without tenure are "out." I hope I got all of the PhD-granting political science departments besides New Orleans. This excludes some excellent departments like Dartmouth; and it also excludes Public Affairs or International Affairs schools (except Maxwell School at Syracuse - I included their department of political science).

For the rest of the description, viewing the excel table alongside this post is probably helpful.

The work was done from late January until mid-February within approximately one month. The dataset indicates when the information was updated for each person. I don't think there are any major biases from the one-month time lag, the period is short enough. I made sure that no information on major journals was added to the ISI database during that time.

The information on the departmental affiliation, PhD schools, and graduation year is collected from various sources. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, it was really difficult to get this information for some people (there was a useful website/online cv for just over 500 people). When calculating the variable "years with PhD" (YearswPhD), I simply subtracted graduation date from 2006. For ABDs and those who got their PhD in 2006, "YearswPhD" field is arbitrarily "1."

Subfield designation is very arbitrary and inconsistent. I mostly relied on the departmental website, if such existed, and then my (mostly incorrect) assessment of what the person was doing. Please, do not rely on those designations. For example, you won't get a listing of people doing comparative politics by selecting fields where subfield designation is "comparative."

Publication data is gathered from ISI Social Sciences Citation index and ISI Arts & Humanities Citation Index (all searches were done in both of the two databases). Only those journal articles that were included in those two databases are counted. This creates serious problems, as anyone well knows. Some good publications are excluded, e.g. Presidential Studies Quarterly, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and the early volumes of Political Analysis. Some non-peer-reviewed are included (some foreign policy journals come to my mind). Chapters in edited volumes are excluded.

Book reviews, editorial matters etc were not included in the database. Also, articles in the PS: Political Science and Politics were left out (this was a judgment call in the beginning to avoid counting "teaching" and "to the profession" type articles, and I decided to exclude all articles even though I discovered later that I have left out some substantive pieces).

Citation count is based on ISI Web of Science Cited Reference search. Everything was done manually person-by person, checking that the particular cited reference belonged to the person. There are certainly errors in this (there are just too many people called "Johnson" or "Kim" or "Lewis" to guarantee complete accuracy), but I believe I did the best I could. The citations are not discounted by the number of authors per reference. And of course, citations to everything (including books and edited volumes) are counted, if the cites appear in ISI articles. Sure, citation rankings are not too useful for very young assistant professors - there has been no time to gather the cites - but it does show something.

Book info is collected from persons' websites, when available. When not available, then I ran a search in the Library of Congress online catalogue.

Many people are obsessed with "top 3" publications (i.e. APSR, AJPS and JOP). I acknowledge that "top 3" is not particularly useful, but I still added the number of publications in "top 3" together for each individual. I did not add a Hix-style impact factor for each journal in order to get "Hix rankings for assistant professors."

The other basic calcuations I already did was discounting each publication by number of authors (and then summing these numbers together - "NoPub/Auth" variable); further dividing this by the number of years with PhD ("NoPub/Auth/YearswPhD"); and similar calculations with "top 3" articles.

For getting the school- and PhDSchool-level calculations, I summed up the YearswPhD variable for each school ("YearswPhD"); summed up the NoPub variable for each school ("NoPub"; note that this will create double entries for a school when two people from one school contribute to the same article); summed up the "discounted by number of authors" number of publications ("NoPub/Auth"); and did similar things to citations and "top 3" articles (everything should be self-explanatory).