An Alternative Interpretation of Recent Political Science Journal Evaluations

In their recent article in PS, Giles, Mizell, and Patterson (1989) provide a long-awaited update of an earlier article (Giles and Wright, 1975) on subjective evaluations by political scientists of a wide range of social science journals. In both articles, Giles and his collaborators sent questionnaires to a random sample of political scientists, asking them to rate each of the journals with which they were familiar on a scale from 0 to 10 with 0 = poor, 2 = fair, 4 = adequate, 6 = good, 8 = very good, and 10 = outstanding. Additional data were also collected on whether or not respondents were familiar with each journal. Based on the evaluation data, Giles et al. calculate the mean evaluation for each of the journals represented, as well as a ranking of the journals from most highly to least highly evaluated. The mean ratings and the rankings of these journals that were calculated by Giles et al. are presented in columns (1) and (5) of Table 1, respectively. The rankings have a fair degree of face validity. For the most part, the major comprehensive journals in political science are found to be ranked highly, based on mean evaluations among those claiming to be familiar with the journal; the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics are all ranked in the top six journals, along with World Politics, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Sociology. Further, several broad-based subfield journals are also ranked highly (e.g., International Organization, Comparative Politics, Political Theory). However, an examination of these ratings yields some intriguing anomalies. What is surprising is that several journals with very narrow audiences and foci are also ranked very highly. For instance, the American Journal of International Law, Soviet Studies, Slavic Review, China Quarterly, Journal of Latin American Studies, and Journal of Political Economy are ranked among the top 22 journals, even though in none of these instances is more than one-quarter of respondents familiar with the journal. These relatively high ratings are obviously due to the high evaluations given these journals by their relatively narrow readerships, and not necessarily because they are highly visible and broadly recognized for the quality of the scholarship contained within their pages.