Looking for the International in international relations and political science: Evidence from author locations in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 1999-2023

Political science and international relations have undergone substantive internationalisation over the last 25 years. This short article uses a dataset covering all papers published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations to investigate how authorship in the journal has changed over time in light of this. It finds that while, overall, BJPIR has been dominated by authors based at institutions in the United Kingdom, the journal has clearly internationalised over the past 10 to 15 years. This internationalisation has mostly been driven by increasing numbers of authors based at European institutions whereas work by authors from outside Europe, North America, and Oceania remains relatively rare. These results provide insights into the journal’s development over the past 25 years, but also the extent and the limitations of the internationalisation of political science and international relations more generally.