Where Is International Relations Going? Evidence from Graduate Training

Recent debates about the state of International Relations (IR) raise the possibility that the field is losing its theoretical innovativeness due to professional incentives to churn out publications. Yet the claims made about IR far outstrip the availability of empirical data. Important assertions derive from a handful of examples rather than systematic evidence. This paper presents an investigation of what gets taught to doctoral students of IR in the United States. I find, among other things, that the type of research most frequently published in IR journals differs in systematic ways from the type of research taught to graduate students. In turn, this raises important questions such as whether certain types of valuable research face a relative disadvantage when it comes to getting published in the first place. The evidence also points to the partial separation of IR from Political Science in the United States. Further, it casts doubt on the growing practice of using Google Scholar to measure research influence. A new metric, which I call the Training Influence Score (TIS), supports the analysis.