I. INTRODUCTION

PS: Political Science & Politics is in its 59th year of publication. PS occupies a unique niche among the APSA portfolio of publications as an outlet for peer-reviewed original research on a variety of topics that are relevant to political scientists and researchers in allied fields. PS publishes research on political events in the US and abroad, political science pedagogy, and research on the state of the discipline. PS welcomes work authored by and reflecting the research priorities of underrepresented groups, those working outside the academy, and scholars residing outside the United States.

The current editorial team started their tenure in 2022. Over the last three years of our editorship, we have sought to expand the readership of the journal by representing the journal at various workshops and conferences in Philadelphia, Montevideo (Uruguay), and Seoul (South Korea). This sort of exposure is raising the profile of the journal by bringing in more readers and potential authors. After introducing the Comment and Controversy section last year and observing how successful it has been so far, we have opted to discontinue the Spotlight section as it did not achieve the high-quality peer review process that we are committed to.

During this past year, the journal has published (or is in the process of publishing) symposia and special issues on cutting edge topics. For example, we published two forecasting special issues, on the 2024 US elections and the 2025 German Elections, respectively. We also published a number of symposia on a wide range of topics including Climate Change and Vulnerable Populations, and Populism and Democracy.

For 2024, PS’s Impact Factor is 1.8. These rankings reflect the number of citations in 2024 to articles published in 2022-23 divided by the number of articles published those years. We look forward to seeing how the Impact Factor changes next year, given the drop from 2023 to 2024, and we will further discuss this trend with you all at the board meeting.

While our team of editors has not changed, our undergraduate Editorial Assistants rotate on an annual basis and this past academic year, we onboarded three new members: Molly Linker, Catarina Laufer Salazar, and Yue (Emily) Wang. We are grateful for their support and for the continuing support of our managing editor and board members.

One of our team’s core objectives is to facilitate the engagement with and representation of all political scientists across the subfields at every type of institution across the world and we seek to accomplish this in numerous ways. This year, we added several political theorists to the editorial board to help improve the representation of political theory and hopefully attract more submissions by political theorists to the journal. We welcome ideas for political theory related calls for papers and/or for people to guest edit political theory symposia.

With the assistance of the Cambridge team and our managing editor, we have updated the APSA and Cambridge University Press websites so that they present more comprehensive information and are more user friendly. Comparable to other APSA journals, PS is now primarily an electronic journal and publishes a budding number of Open Access publications so as to expand accessibility. Our increasing reliance on social media to promote the latest publications and highlight Open Access journal articles assists us in expanding the knowledge of and access to our journal’s publications.

Another one of our core objectives is to ensure that published scholarly research is ethical, clear and transparent across disciplinary subfields and epistemological, methodological approaches. Submissions to PS are required to adhere to the APSA’s_Guide_to_Professional_Ethics_in_Political_Science and the APSA’s_Principles_and_Guidance_for_Human_Subjects_Research. Further, we require that every author of an empirical paper submit their data file(s) to the Harvard Dataverse for replication purposes prior to the publication of manuscripts. For more information, see https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/ps/. We believe that these requirements not only improve the quality of research publications but the discipline as a whole.

We sincerely welcome comments, suggestions, and ideas to be shared with us by emailing our team at ps@apsanet.org. PS is one of the primary outlets for research on the profession, and we’ve been proud to continue publishing important articles and symposia highlighting the challenges of broadening and diversifying our profession (and academia) and combating conscious and unconscious biases in hiring, promotion, and peer review. We feel an important sense of responsibility to provide an outlet for disciplinary debates.

Our team has also released various Calls for Papers and created upcoming Special Issues and accepted Symposia in our focused effort to welcome work authored by and reflecting the research priorities of underrepresented groups, those working outside the academy, and scholars residing outside the United States. We have relied upon our subfield networks and listservs in which we are a part of to ensure that our Calls are widely circulated. Examples of our Calls for Papers, Symposia, and upcoming Special Issues include research on:

• • Contemporary and Future LGBTQ+ Scholarship in Political Science

• • The 30th Publication Anniversary of Dr. Paula D. McClain’s: Can We All Get Along? Racial and Ethnic Minorities in American Politics

• • American Trade Policy in the 21st Century

DIVERSITY EFFORTS

PS supports the diversity efforts of APSA and our discipline. The editorial team is committed to attracting more submissions from international and underrepresented scholars, and the Calls for Papers have been crafted with this goal in mind. See Table 1 for the demographic breakdown of authors who submitted manuscripts to PS in 2022, 2023, and 2024 (Table1).

Table 1.

Demographic Profile of Author Submissions 2022 - 2024