UPenn Political Science Department is Among the Top Ten

The Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania is a top ten department according to a newly published global ranking of research productivity in the discipline. The article was published in PS: Political Science & Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. Tables 1, 2, and 3 below show that the department ranked within the top ten in North America across most measured criteria.

Table 1: Penn’s Place among Political Science Departments by Region

(North America)

Source: Barceló et al 2025: Table 1 and Appendix.

Table 2: Penn’s Performance per Faculty Member by Region

(North America)

Source: Barceló et al 2025: Table 2

Table 3: Performance of Penn’s Full Professors by Region

(North America)

Source: Source: Barceló et al 2025: Appendix A6. Full Professors

The study was conducted on publications in the five-year interval 2018-22. The authors collected data on over 115,000 articles and over 12,600 books—written in English and other languages—published by over 5,500 faculty in 178 departments in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania. They built their database from the online CVs of Political Scientists and their Google Scholar indices. Kudos to Professor Guy Grossman who ranked joint 4th in the individual “Recent Top Publications” category.

Congratulations to all the department’s faculty for contributing to these outstanding rankings, and to all the staff, research assistants, and doctoral/postdoctoral students who helped make this rise in recognition possible. Tributes should also be paid to numerous sources of research funding—including from Penn, Penn donors, and numerous foundations and federal agencies.

Source: Barceló J, Paik C, van der Windt P, Zhai H. “A Global Ranking of Research Productivity of Political Science Departments.” PS: Political Science & Politics. Published online 2025:1-12. doi:10.1017/S1049096524001239 Click here for more information and to read the article.