Political Science Quarterly

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Worked examples

Is an instance

Consulting Political Science Quarterly's 2-year Journal Impact Factor and Scopus CiteScore on Oxford Academic before submitting a governance manuscript.

Is an instance

Evaluating Political Science Quarterly's 31-year cited half-life to analyze the long-term citation persistence of public policy literature.

Quick answer: Political Science Quarterly (PSQ) is indexed in major open and subscription citation indexes, recording a 2-year mean citedness of 0.50 and an h-index of 242 in OpenAlex bibliometric records (openalex.org/S161027966), with 17,327 cataloged works receiving over 338,900 total citations. Because proprietary Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Scopus CiteScore metrics reside behind commercial database licenses, researchers requiring proprietary Clarivate JCR releases must verify the current data year figure directly through licensed institutional access.

Political Science Quarterly (PSQ) is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Academy of Political Science. Founded in 1886, it is one of the oldest continuous scholarly journals dedicated to nonpartisan empirical analysis of government, political behavior, international affairs, and public policy.

What Journal Citation Metrics Measure

In scholarly evaluation, citation metrics assess aggregate journal-level performance rather than the merit of specific articles. The standard two-year citation metric calculates the average citation frequency received in a given calendar year by articles and reviews published during the two preceding years:

Citation Rate = (Citations in Year t to Items Published in Years t-1 and t-2) / (Total Citable Items in Years t-1 and t-2)

While commercial providers such as Clarivate publish the proprietary Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Elsevier publishes CiteScore, open bibliometric platforms like OpenAlex compute transparent, open citation indicators across comprehensive publication corpuses.

Verified Journal Profile and Open Metrics

Official registry records from Crossref, OpenAlex, and The Academy of Political Science (psqonline.org) verify the following structural metadata:

Publisher: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Academy of Political Science.
Publication History: Continuous publication since 1886.
ISSN: Print 0032-3195; Online 1538-165X (Crossref journal record).
Cataloged Works: 17,327 works registered in OpenAlex; 17,273 total DOIs registered in Crossref.
Citation Corpus: 338,900 total citations recorded in OpenAlex.
Two-Year Mean Citedness: 0.50 (OpenAlex citation indicator).
Journal h-Index: 242 (OpenAlex summary statistics).
Journal i10-Index: 4,040 works with at least 10 citations.

Citation Accumulation in Political Science

Citation dynamics in political science and public policy differ fundamentally from high-velocity biomedical disciplines. In social science and governance studies, peer-reviewed articles accumulate scholarly citations steadily over decades rather than peaking in the immediate two-year post-publication window. Consequently, short two-year citation metrics capture only immediate uptake, whereas cumulative measures (such as the h-index of 242) better reflect sustained intellectual influence across governance institutions.

Responsible Use in Research Evaluation

In line with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), journal-level metrics must never serve as automated proxies for the quality of individual articles or individual researchers.

Institutional appointment panels, promotion committees, and grant reviewers must appraise the substantive intellectual contribution, methodological rigor, and empirical validity of individual publications rather than the citation average of the publishing journal.

Related Terms

Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — Clarivate’s proprietary two-year journal citation average.
CiteScore — Scopus four-year citation accumulation metric.
DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — International agreement establishing responsible research evaluation standards.
What Is Political Science? — Guide to core research methods, empirical frameworks, and publishing standards.

Frequently Asked Questions

What open citation metrics are available for Political Science Quarterly?

OpenAlex records a 2-year mean citedness of 0.50, an h-index of 242, and over 338,900 total citations across 17,327 cataloged works.

How can researchers verify PSQ’s proprietary Journal Impact Factor?

Because the Journal Impact Factor is proprietary to Clarivate Analytics, researchers should consult the annual Journal Citation Reports release through a licensed institutional subscription.

Who publishes Political Science Quarterly?

The journal is published by Oxford University Press for The Academy of Political Science, having appeared continuously since its founding in 1886.

Does a journal’s citation average reflect individual article quality?

No. Citation rates measure journal-level distribution averages. DORA and CoARA explicitly caution against using journal-level metrics to evaluate individual papers or scholars.

Sources

OpenAlex API. Source Record: Political Science Quarterly (S161027966). api.openalex.org/sources?search=Political+Science+Quarterly (Read 2026-11-08).
Crossref Metadata API. Journal Registry: Political Science Quarterly (ISSN 0032-3195). api.crossref.org/journals/0032-3195 (Read 2026-11-08).
The Academy of Political Science. Political Science Quarterly Overview and History. psqonline.org (Read 2026-11-08).

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