Collaboration for Social Scientists in TPM

The Spring 2011 issue of The Political Methodologist is online and includes an article on collaboration tools for social scientists (cowritten with Paul F. Testa and Nils B. Weidmann). The issue also has articles by Jake Bowers, Kieran Healy, and Shawn Treier. Well worth a read if you are looking to sharpen your research skills (and we all should be).

Notably absent from the article was a list of “thank yous.” I should have thanked the editorial staff of the TPM for the call for research related papers. I had at least three versions of this paper sketched out, but never finished. This issue should have included an article on getting work finished without a deadline (a must read for me). I also wish to thank Jake Bowers specifically for comments and fixes during the writing process. Finally, I wish to thank all the more experienced programmers I’ve worked with. Pretty much everything in that article I learned on the job. On the job “citations” don’t fit well into a .bib file, but are no less important to the success of the article.