Dear Colleagues,

I would like to draw your attention to a short course on "Rethinking
Publication" to be held on August 30 (the day before the actual start of the
APSA Annual Convention). The course has recently been added to APSA's short
course programme.
Greetings,
Britta Weiffen


RETHINKING  PUBLICATION
APSA  SHORT  COURSE

August 30, 2006
Time: 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Location: On the premises of the APSA Annual Meeting

The short course will revisit familiar approaches to social science in the
context of the ways in which the implicit requirements of publication shape
our knowledge of politics, above and beyond the explicit standards of the
methods we use in research.  Participants should come away from the session
with a broadened set of strategies for evaluating and reporting on their own
research findings.

The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in the diverse methods
available to individual scholars and research teams.  Yet the process of
social inquiry as a joint and community enterprise has received far less
attention.  The workshop brings together leading scholars of statistics,
medicine, philosophy and politics to explore the relationship between
evidence, theory and method from the perspectives of the natural, clinical,
applied and social sciences.  We will consider how researchers in different
disciplines conduct scientific inquiry, and what they do with their
results.  We will critically examine knowledge cumulation, reporting and the
research process in political science.

We will discuss 1) how research findings become positive or negative, and
the range of procedures available to us for generating, reporting and
analyzing both (including thick modelling, causal discovery, and data and
clinical trials registries), 2) what significance (really) is, and its role
in inference, 3) determining and managing the robustness of empirical
results, and what to do with research products and by-products, 4) defining,
measuring and compensating for selection and publication bias, and 5)
whether or not the issues and remedies that apply to knowledge cumulation
and reporting within quantitative approaches to social science also apply
within qualitative ones.

The workshop will include time for discussion of examples of specific
research programs and findings, and for consideration and reconsideration of
new and old forms of academic publication and collaboration.


Presenters

Prof. David Collier – (Political Scientist), Professor of Political Science,
University of California, Berkeley; Chair, Academic Council, Consortium for
Qualitative Research Methods

Prof. Robert Boruch (Statistician), University Trustee Chair Professor of
Education and Professor of Statistics, Wharton School, University of
Pennsylvania; Steering Group Co-Chair, The Campbell Collaboration

Prof. Alan S. Gerber (Political Scientist), Professor of Political Science
and Director of the Center for the Study of American Politics, Yale
University; Author of papers on the file-drawer problem and publication bias
in political science

Dr. Bjorn R. Olsen (Professor of Medicine), Hersey Professor of Cell
Biology, Harvard Medical School; Editor in Chief, Journal of Negative
Results in Biomedicine

Prof. Richard Scheines (Philosopher of Science and of Social Science),
Department Head, Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University;
Director of the TETRAD Project


Co-Sponsor(s):
The Journal of Spurious Correlations
The European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Political
Methodology

Organizer Contact Information:

David Lehrer
Department of Political Science,
University of Helsinki, FINLAND
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: +49 30 7974 6255

No Registration Fee, please e-mail David Lehrer at [log in to unmask]
to register.

**********************************************************
             Political Methodology E-Mail List
        Editor: Karen Long Jusko <[log in to unmask]>
**********************************************************
        Send messages to [log in to unmask]
  To join the list, cancel your subscription, or modify
           your subscription settings visit:

          http://polmeth.wustl.edu/polmeth.php

**********************************************************