Exeter Politics has two of the most central political scientists in the world

In a study of more than 67,000 articles, Thomas Metz and Sebastian Jäckle (both at the University of Freiburg in Germany) look at patterns of publications by more than 40,000 political scientists worldwide between 1990 and 2013. Their intuition is to think of research output in terms of networks rather than individual citations. Be examining different measures based on co-authorship, relationships and flows they find the most central authors in the global network. Among them are Oliver James and Claudio Radaelli, two professors of Politics at Exeter.

“When I saw my name on the list of the most influential and connected authors in the world, I found it humbling. Yet this shows that our effort to create and maintain research networks in different fields of political science, across different continents, is empirically visible. I also like to think that the future lies in progressive research agendas that connect scholars in network-mode. For this reason the participation of UK-based researchers in European-funded networks and large international projects is fundamental: the process of exiting the EU should not damage this’ – Radaelli said. Oliver James concurred saying “the two metrics for network centrality help show that researchers at Exeter are committed to being part of the heart of an expanding and increasing interconnected international political science research community.”