A paper by Daniel Maliniak & Ryan Powers presented at the recent annual convention of the International Studies Association (ISA) performed a journal network analysis of the international relations literature for the period 1980–2006. The analysis is built on 5,724 articles from 12 leading international relations journals (including Journal of Peace Research, founded and edited at PRIO).The articles are ranked not only by their number of citations but also in terms of their ‘authority score’, where articles get a higher score if they are cited by articles that are themselves highly cited. When applying this tool to the institutional affiliations of the authors, the paper finds that all top twenty-five institutions for the 1980–95 period are universities in the US. However, for the period 1996–2006, two non-US institutions make it on to the list: PRIO in 16th place and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 20th place.
A number of scholars in both institutions have contributed to the strong showing, but the institutional collaboration between the two is probably a decisive factor. This collaboration has taken place between NTNU and PRIO since the early 1990s, reinforced by the start-up of PRIO’s
Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) in late 2002.
At the moment, three PRIO research professors (Halvard Buhaug, Scott Gates and Nils Petter Gleditsch) have joint appointments in political science at NTNU. A number of doctoral students are affiliated with both institutions. The study also finds that the democratic peace debate has been the dominant debate in the discipline during this period, a debate in which several PRIO and NTNU scholars have participated actively.
2012 is also a record year for PhD dissertations at NTNU for PhD candidates with a joint affiliation NTNU/CSCW. Siri Rustad has already defended, Rune Slettebak and Karin Dyrstad will defend their dissertations in May, and Ole Magnus Theisen expects to submit his dissertation in the late Spring. All CSCW-affiliated doctoral students are encouraged to publish articles in refereed journals at an early stage and their publication records is an important part of this success story.