The article describes the history and the process of editing the Czech Journal of Political Science. First, it puts the journal into the general context of the development of Czech political science. The journal is now one of three well-established political science journals in the Czech Republic, and invites contributions in all subfields of the discipline. The article discusses the limitations of a social scientific journal published predominantly in a small-nation language. Second, it focuses on the particular steps of the editing process. It primarily describes the peer review process.

Editing a journal like the European Journal of Political Research means in the first place the organisation of a constant reviewing process. Finding referees and making sure that they provide useful reports is needed for making wise decisions. Double-blind refereeing is indeed the generally accepted procedure for selecting publishable articles. This blind refereeing process is also believed to be the best way to select high-quality manuscripts. It is a sacred ritual. Yet the real life of refereeing can sometimes be quite messy and is not at all free from biases. It tends to be a fairly conservative selection process.

The Journal of European Public Policy was launched to fill a perceived intellectual gap in the market for European public policy research. It appears to have been a success but some luck was needed, good academic contacts, and a publisher willing to take a risk by committing quite large sums of money up front. Referees are hugely important for the success of a journal but this does not mean that editors should not occasionally exercise their own judgement. Evaluation and ranking of journals is a complex and unreliable process. Thus, the market is probably the best judge. If a journal sells well and subscriptions are rising it is probably ok! Submission fees seem a bad idea as authors already work for no pay. Payment for referees might work but is it really necessary? Finally, let us have more journals and more competition for our work.

Despite the creation of ever more journals in the field of political theory, all so far seem to have found their distinctive niche. By and large, competition between journals has proven beneficial for the discipline, opening up new areas of research and stimulating innovation. As with other goods, product differentiation, quality control and association with a major distributor are the keys to success.

The article explores the development and institutionalisation of political science in Romania after 1989. It argues that, despite a rapid process of expansion and institutionalisation, the emergence of political science as an internationally competitive discipline has been fundamentally affected by two types of factors: communist legacies and systemic under-investment in teaching and research.

Journals are currently ‘ranked’ by their influential ‘impact factor’ and their ‘total number of cites’ – both published by Thomson, the company producing and selling the (Social) Science Citation Index. This article suggests an alternative view and ranks political science journals according to the number of articles published within a period of time that have ‘frequently’ been cited.

Do academic publication standards reflect or determine research results? The article proposes minimal criteria for distinguishing useful ‘unpublishable’ results from low-quality research, and argues that the virtues of negative results have been overlooked. We consider the fate these results have suffered thus far, review arguments for and against their publication and introduce a new initiative – a journal to disseminate negative results and advance debate on their recognition and use.

Conceptualisations of ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ tend to diverge quite significantly from one another in contemporary literature. The origins of this split can be traced back to the works of Carl Schmitt and Max Weber. By accentuating the opposition between these conceptions, we are able to detect two different attitudes toward politics. The Schmittian ideal of the political longs for stability that extends beyond the daily quarrels of politics, whereas the Weberian thinkers understand politics as a contingent activity par excellence.

In the last twenty-five years there has been a significant alteration in the student experience in the UK. In the early 1980s it was rare for students either to fail to take exams or produce assignments on time or for them to fail to complete the degree they had begun. Now a significant proportion of students who start a programme of study withdraw before completion and this ‘attrition’ has become a particular problem for some universities and for the higher education funding bodies. This article reports the results of a project that conducted qualitative, depth interviews not focussed so much on finding reasons for having left, but rather on the experience and biography of those facing problems and thus likely to consider leaving or being forced to leave. A particular focus of this approach was to investigate a different dimension of the issue: student motivation for studying.