Mannheim political science among the best in the world: New study shows outstanding research performance
Publications that have undergone rigorous peer review are generally reviewed as the quality gold standard for social scientific research results. Mannheim political scientists have been actively publishing the results of their research in these formats for years.
A group of political scientists at New York University Abu Dhabi has now analyzed the productivity of political science departments around the world and published their results in the widely-read journal Political Science and Politics (Barceló, Joan, Christopher Paik, Peter van der Windt, and Haoyu Zhai. 2025. “A Global Ranking of Research Productivity of Political Science Departments.” PS: Political Science & Politics: 1–12.).
The authors analyzed over 100,000 journal articles and over 12,000 academic books for the affiliation of authors to compare the publication productivity of departments. To reduce the overall number of authors, they limited their analyses to affiliations with departments across six world regions where these departments appear in the top 50 departments in the QS World University Rankings. Despite its relatively small size Mannheim’s political science is noted as particularly productive.
Productivity in a department makes the most sense to be understood as per capital publications. The authors have included a table that ranks top departments by that metric. Mannheim political science appears in the top 10 for European programs by all criteria ranked. The global ranking shows how outstanding the publication record is with Mannheim coming in sixth globally when ranked by “impact” of publications and fifth by “recent impact” (Table 3).
These results point to some of the weaknesses of broader rankings, particularly in terms of including the size of programs. The authors conclude that, “ETH Zürich was ranked as the top department globally under the total-impact, recent-citations, and recent-impact metrics; other departments—including Mannheim University, Humboldt University, Utrecht University, EUI, and KU Leuven made the global top 10 lists under one or more of the six performance measures (see online appendix table A3). None of these departments made the top 10 list in the QS Rankings.“ (p. 11). This analysis clearly points to the excellence of research carried out by Mannheim political scientists.