Can We Change the Topic, Please? Assessing the Theoretical Construction of International Relations Scholarship

Abstract

A number of international relations scholars charge that the field suffers from academic religiosity: factional divisions along theoretical lines that limit research potential and create unnecessary bias against certain approaches. I explore this view of the field by applying a topic-modeling algorithm to a corpus of article abstracts from prominent journals in international relations. I generate a new dataset of information on international relations scholarship over more than two-and-a-half decades. I find evidence in support of claims that academic factionalism can negatively affect the research process. Paradigmatic foundations, though not present in most international relations studies, are closely linked to a large number of research topics and are associated with higher citation counts. At the same time, such works appear to be less likely than others to be "pathbreaking." My analysis also supports a narrative common in recent scholarship that citation counts, though somewhat effective in their measurement of scholarly impact, are sensitive to organizational features of the academic process.