PS: Political Science & Politics

Publications

PS: Political Science & Politics PS: Political Science & Politics is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on contemporary politics, teaching, and the discipline. PS is also APSA’s journal of record for the profession.

January 2010 VOLUME 43 NUMBER 1

Symposium: Data Collection and Collaboration

From symposium Editor's Introduction by Rose McDermott, Brown University:

During a recent meeting of the APSA Publications Committee, headed by Lisa Martin, we discussed a proposal that had been put forward to encourage authors to deposit their data in a central repository to provide more centralized access for others seeking toreplicate or extendprior work. Such a strategy should ostensibly make it easier for methodological, theoretical, and empirical work to flourish and cumulate.

In the ensuing discussion about whether and how such a process might be supported and incentivized, it became clear that many important, often unaddressed, issues come into play when considering this strategy. Qualitative and quantitative data may require alternate formats for effective archiving, and may necessitate different protections concerning confidentiality around sources. In addition, questions regarding authorship come to the fore when one set of scholars spends time collecting data while others who may have no relationship with them use, analyze, and write up other aspects of that data. Hard sciences have developed informal norms around many of these issues, often involving proprietary usage of data for a specified period of time. In this way, authors are required to submit data to journal Web sites for purposes of replication, but the use of that information has an embargo period during which only those who collected the data can publish off of it. However, political science has not yet developed a similar set of consensual norms.p>

As a result, the committee decided to put together the following symposium on issues related to data archiving and authorship in an attempt to provide some background, and to begin a discussion amongst the wider discipline about some of the associated broader professional issues involving authorship and collaboration. It is our hope that we can build on previous work and reports on related topics written by Biggs (2008) and the American Political Science Association's Working
Group on Collaboration (Chandra et al. 2006).

Also in This Issue:

Who Supports Health Reform?, by
David W. Brady and Daniel P. Kessler
Professional Symposium: Theories of Power, Poverty, and Law
Gaus Lecture
Table of Contents

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