International relations (IR) as a discipline have had a troubled history in Italy. Indeed, the previous academic literature on the topic has highlighted how the lack of critical mass and influence of Italian IR scholarship have negatively impacted its visibility at the international level (Lucarelli and Menotti in Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 32(1):32–82, 2002; Friedrichs in European approaches to international relations theory: a house with many mansions, Routledge, London, 2004). However, there are few systematic studies that focus on the scientific publications of Italian scholars in IR. In order to fill this gap, the article presents the results of a study assessing Italian scholars’ impact in peer-reviewed international journals. Specifically, this work aims to make a broader assessment of Italian scholars’ publications from 2011 to 2017 using a database that includes 25 high impact-factor international peer-reviewed journals and five Italian journals. It also aims to identify the gender, geographic origin, affiliation and academic role of Italian scholars, as well as the topic, area, theoretical approach and methodological underpinnings of each article, so as to generate previously unexplored findings on the solidity and impact of Italian IR research both in Italy and abroad.

The paper deals with a couple of speculations by John E. Trent with respect to the state and impact of contemporary political science. It particularly takes issue with the Trent claim that political science must become more relevant and instead emphasizes the need for an independent science system. Furthermore, it accepts the notion that there is a problem with respect to overspecialization but regards this as a necessity if science and research want to move ahead. The Trent argument about schisms in political science theorizing and research methodology must be taken seriously, but can and should be counteracted by the good will of scholars to seek regular intellectual exchanges also in fields where controversy rages. Finally, it is argued in the paper that the Trent worldview is very much a North American one that should be balanced by looking also at other political science communities around the world.

We examine and discuss the state of political science in Ireland, using a new dataset on articles published in major domestic, European, and international academic journals by authors affiliated with Irish institutions during the period 1999–2014. Our main findings are as follows: political scientists in Ireland have generally focused more on comparative politics and international relations than on methodology, political theory, or public policy. In terms of methods and authorship, however, there are some notable differences between articles published in domestic, European, and international journals. Qualitative analysis and single case studies have been more commonly employed in national-level publications, while inferential quantitative analysis and large-N data have been more widely used in international-level articles. Gender balance in authorship is now more the norm in national journals than in European and international journals. Finally, Irish political science has undergone significant changes during the period examined. There have been increases in co-authoring and the use of inferential quantitative methods and large-N data which are typically associated with the approaches taken in the major international journals of political science. In this regard, Irish political science has become more ‘globalised’.

This article examines the distribution of gender in arguments in example sentences in contemporary linguistics publications. Prior studies have shown that example sentences in syntax textbooks systematically underrepresent women and perpetuate gender stereotypes (Macaulay & Brice 1994, 1997, Pabst et al. 2018). Here we examine example sentences in articles published over the past twenty years in Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and find striking similarities to this prior work. Among our findings, we show a stark imbalance of male (N = 12,117) to female (N = 5,571) arguments, where male-gendered arguments are more likely to be subjects, and female-gendered arguments nonsubjects. We show that female-gendered arguments are more likely to be referred to using a kinship term, to exhibit positive emotions, and to be the object of affection, whereas male-gendered arguments are more likely to have occupations, to exhibit negative emotions, and to perpetrate violence. We show that this pattern has remained stable, with little change, over the course of the twenty years that we examine, leading up to the present day. We conclude with a brief discussion of possible remedies and suggestions for improvement.

Based on data on 67,000 articles published in 100 high-impact journals in the twenty years between 2000 and 2019, I analyse the scientific contribution of European political science scholarly communities in the global context. The scholars contributing to the global scientific production are largely concentrated in a few countries, with the US and UK alone accounting for more than half of the articles published in high-impact journals. However, the tendency is towards increasing diversity in the geographic basis of the international scientific production; and European countries are central to this change. Contributing to international collaborative publications has been a key engine of the increased scientific production of scholars based in Europe. This was a generalised global tendency, and a spectacular one for certain national scholarly communities. The network analysis of international collaborations points to the consolidation of three clusters within a growing and increasingly dense network. The US, followed by the UK, are central to a global cluster of collaborations. European countries are primarily clustered in two groups: a larger and growing cluster; and a smaller but even more integrated, highly productive and connected cluster of scholars based in seven northern European countries. All bibliometric indicators consistently point to a generalised growth in the output and internationalisation of the scientific contribution provided by the European political science community.

A bibliometric analysis was undertaken to chart the development of animal welfare (AW) science as a whole, and of the individuals, organisations and countries that have had most academic impact to date. Publication data were collected from the Web of Science for the year range 1968-2017 and by-hand pre-processing of the data was undertaken to identify reviews and original research articles on AW. VOSviewer was used to create bibliometric networks. There has been a 13.3% annual growth in AW publications in the last 50 years with Animal Welfare and Applied Animal Behaviour Science the most frequent publishers of AW publications. Farm animals continue to dominate the subject of AW research and comparison of network visualisations for five key species suggested possible gaps in the research, such as relatively little emphasis on emotion research for some farm animals and little research on inherited disorders in dogs. However, keyword analysis indicated a recent broadening of AW findings to include other international contexts, such as conservation and sustainability. Highly cited review articles were grouped into five clusters with affective state (ie emotions, moods) and fish welfare the most recent topics. Almost all core authors of original research articles study farm animals, though in the last ten years other topics, such as consumer attitudes and wildlife, have emerged as highly cited areas of original research articles. Network analysis of organisations revealed the University of Bristol, UK as the main publisher of original research articles. Citation analysis indicated that many low-cited articles were originating from Germany and were published in German journals, suggesting that many worthwhile results and opinions on AW may be being missed by other researchers due to a language barrier. Several limitations of bibliometric analysis to generate an overview of AW science were identified, including the challenge of how to search and extract all the relevant publications in this discipline. In conclusion, animal welfare science is still in an exponential phase of growth which will bring opportunities, such as for the publication of new journals, but also challenges. The insights generated by this study suggest bibliometric analysis to be a useful addition to other approaches investigating the trends and concepts of animal welfare.

Reviewing the extant literature on China's public sphere from the perspective of 20th-century history and social science, this introductory essay argues for the continued relevance of studying the publications and public practices associated with knowledge communities. By steering away from normative definitions and by envisaging publicness as a process, a connection can be explored between social discourses and political practices in China. Discursive communities, based on shared identity or sociability, may appear marginal, but at key moments they can play a unique role in modifying the dynamics of political events.

A biographic summary of the research of Dr Graham Charles George Argent (born 15 May 1941, died 24 April 2019) is presented, summarising his research career. Expedition information, including dates, collection number series and the names of collaborators, is given, as is a list of his publications, annotated with taxonomic decisions and the names of new species described within them.

We analyzed the publication productivity supported by the Puerto Rico Consortium for Clinical and Translational Research (PRCTRC) using the structured process of scientometrics. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of the research and collaborations as presented in publications. Manuscripts published from 2010 to 2018 and that had the PRCTRC award number and a PMCID number were retrieved from the Science Citation Index database. Scientometric indicators included h-index (HI), average citation (AC), collaboration coefficient (CC), collaboration index (CI), and degree of collaboration (DC) analysis, and relative citation ratio (RCR) was done with Web of Science Platform, iCite, and Stata software. Joinpoint Trend Analysis Software was used to calculate the annual percent change (APC). From 2010 to 2018, 341 publications were identified with an average of 38 publications per year and a total of 3569 citations excluding self-citations. A significant growth (APC: 17.76%, P < 0.05) of scientific production was observed. The overall HI was 31, and the AC per item was 11.04. The overall CC was 0.82, the CI was 8.59, and the DC was 99.1%. This study demonstrates a statistically significant increase in the PRCTRC scientific production. Results allow for the assessment of the progress resulting from the provided support and to plan further strategies accordingly.

This paper explores the idea of “recuperative memory” with respect to the process of coming to terms with the past after the fall of the Romanian Communist regime in 1989. Its method is to examine the mechanisms used by recuperative memory in order to re-appropriate the past and emphasize the inherently mediated and multifaceted nature of this process. Using various examples from oral testimonies, autobiographical writings, literary works, and cinema, the paper argues that the role of recuperative memory is not only to facilitate the process of coming to terms with the past, but also to offer the material necessary to sustain a viable politics of memory. This entails providing a platform for the intergenerational transmission of memory and knowledge for those who did not live under the Communist regime, filling in this way the intergenerational gap, despite the lack of political class engagement.

The International Review of the Red Cross (formerly the Bulletin Internationale des Sociétés de Secours aux Militaires Blessés) is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2019, making it the oldest of the general publications produced by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Originally created as a communication tool for the entire International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the Review rapidly changed its course to become first the primary mouthpiece of the ICRC for many years, and finally an academic journal. This article will retrace the history of this evolution, during which, under cover of humanitarianism, political factors played a significant role.