RSSBack in grad school, I used to exchange 1- or 2-page summaries of journal articles with my peers. All of us read the articles (at least I did), but we shared the task of writing notes about them. I would collect summaries from fellow grad students at UCSD and post them to wikisum.com. You’ll find lots of summaries of classic (pre-2006) books and articles there, although the summaries vary widely in quality depending on who wrote them.
Now that grad school’s over, I still read books and journal articles. And I still take notes on them. I post the notes here mainly for my own benefit–storing them in this format makes it easier for me to search through them. If these summaries are useful to you, great. If you’d like to discuss my reviews, please post a comment. If you’d like to start blogging here with me, please do, as long as you’re a professor or doctoral candidate in political science.
What Do I Write About?
I review whatever I happen to be reading. I mostly read AJPS, APSR, JOP, SPPQ, and Political Behavior. I don’t write about everything I read, and sometimes I go months without writing at all. I rarely take the time to write about a book I’ve read. My main fields of interest are American political behavior and state politics, so that’s what I write about the most. I make no effort to cover all political science. Remember, I keep this site mainly for my own benefit, not to save others the trouble of reading on their own. I’m aware that others use it for that, but that’s their loss.
Why Abandon WikiSum?
Abstract Politics grew out of wikisum.com. Back in my grad school days, I used wikisum to import and display large numbers of summarizes from databases like Endnote. But I found wikisum’s wiki-based structure excessively complicated for my present purposes. Plus, it was hard for folks using wikisum to tell who had written a summary, since I imported all the summaries that my peers wrote under my own username. Trust me, I’m the first to admit that many of the summaries on wikisum aren’t very good. So I switched to a blog format, and Abstract Politics was born. Wikisum is still around–check it out if you’re looking for summaries of older research (pre-2006ish)–but it is now little more than an archive.