BETWEEN THE COVERS: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN BOOKS

Note: This is a rough draft, presented in a conversational style, based upon an initial coding sample of 300 IR books from the top five presses between 2000-2010. We presented this paper first at the Workshop on Teaching, Research and International Politics (TRIP) at the International Studies Association annual convention in Montreal, Canada, on March 15, 2011. Based upon feedback from the workshop, we plan to expand the coding exercise to 1,000 books between 1990-2010. In addition, we conducted interviews with all of the press editors from the top five presses investigated in this study. We also plan to conduct interviews with a sample of IR book authors, and are in the process of adding relevant questions to the September 2011 TRIP survey of IR scholars in twelve countries. All results presented here are based upon very early analysis of the descriptive data. A much more detailed statistical analysis will be conducted when we complete the full sample of 1,000 books and when the TRIP team also updates the journal article coding to 2010 (currently it stops at 2008). Comments and questions are welcome, and we would especially appreciate constructive criticism on the research design and empirical analysis