Most-Cited Political Science Articles by Decade from the 1940s to 2020s

Citation data from Web of Science identifies the most-cited political science journal articles per decade from the 1940s through the 2020s. Logan Strother compiled this data, which was last updated on June 5, 2026. The results show a shift from the American Political Science Review's dominance to a wider range of journals and a growing share of influential methodological papers.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the evolution of influential publication venues based on citation data per decade.
• Studying the rise of methodological papers as a share of highly cited research.
• Tracking the changing dominance of specific journals like the American Political Science Review over time.

Strengths

• Data spans eight decades from the 1940s to the 2020s.
• Citation data is sourced from the authoritative Web of Science database.
• Analysis is focused on the most-cited articles per decade, providing a clear measure of influence.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The dataset's focus on journal articles may exclude other influential publication types like books.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse, author Logan Strother.

Collection Method

Likely compiled from citation data extracted from Web of Science.

Time Range

1940s through 2020s.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-05 11:08:22; freshness should be verified.