RSSRemember back in grad school how you would exchange 1- or 2-page summaries of journal articles with your peers? Well, that’s how this site started. Originally, 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.
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.
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. My main fields of interest are American political behavior and state politics, so that’s what I write about the most. If you follow research in other subfields, please consider becoming a contributor. More people contributing means more research (from more diverse fields) being summarized. You’ll need to post under your real name, and you need to be either a professor or doctoral candidate in political science. Start now!
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; in particular, it made discussion and debate difficult. 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.
My name is Adam Brown. I am an assistant professor of political science. (