Welcome

Notes on political science research

 

About

We review whatever we happen to be reading. Mostly read AJPS, APSR, JOP, SPPQ, and Political Behavior. We don’t write about everything we read, and sometimes we go months without writing at all. Rarely we take the time to write about a book we’ve read. Our main fields of interest are American political behavior and state politics, so that’s what I write about the most. We make no effort to cover all political science. Remember, We keep this site mainly for my own benefit, not to save others the trouble of reading on their own. We are aware that others use it for that, but that’s their loss.

Back in grad school, we 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. We 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, we still read books and journal articles. And I still take notes on them. We 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.

Our main goal is just to help others remember what weve read.