In my previous post, I looked at the most cited article in political science by decade. Here, I concentrate on the Canadian Journal of Political Science and look at the most cited articles published in the journal. I only collected data for the top 5 for each decade.
One interesting thing that you might not notice by just looking at the titles is that Jane Jenson authored three of these top 5 papers for three different decades. Here’s a pdf version of the figure.
To see if these articles aged well or not , I also made a plot of the number of times they have been cited since 2010. In this case, I replaced the dots by the total number of citations. This could also have been done with the data for all of Political Science. Another proxy to get at this idea of articles reflecting a particular trend would have been to look at the proportion of total citations in the first five years after publication.
Using this figure (in pdf), it’s interesting to compare “Hartz and Horowitz at 20″ with Black’s “The Practice of Politics in Two Settings”. The former hasn’t been cited since 2010 while the latter has had 17 of its 29 citations in the last 4 years. Pretty good for an article published in 1987. The fact that Black’s article is about immigration speaks to what people are writing about these days!