The state of the discipline: authorship, research designs, and citation patterns in studies of EU interest groups and lobbying

ABSTRACT

Which European universities and research centres are most prominent in research on European Union (EU) interest groups? What are the theoretical perspectives employed currently in this scholarship? What research designs do scholars employ to study and investigate EU interest groups? And finally, what are the academic works that constitute the core building blocks on which researchers of EU lobbying build their theoretical arguments and empirical research? We answer these questions by analysing an original, built-for-purpose dataset providing information on the theoretical approaches, research designs and bibliographic references employed in 196 academic articles published on the topic of EU lobbying and interest groups in 22 European and American journals of political science and public policy. The dataset also contains information about authors' academic affiliation and Ph.D.-awarding institutions. We combine two approaches employed in the literature on systematic analyses of a discipline: the research synthesis and meta-analysis approach, and the bibliometric approach.

KEY WORDS:

• Analytical review
• European Union lobbying
• scholarship

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to Raimondas Ibenskas, Beate Kohler and three anonymous referees for their excellent comments on previous versions of our article. We thank Robert Thomson for his inspired suggestion to analyse citation networks during the early stages of our research. We also thank participants in the 7th Pan-European Conference on the European Union for their helpful comments. During this research, Adriana benefited from a Fulbright–Schuman award at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2012–2013).

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the Taylor & Francis website.

Notes

1 For a detailed description of the project see http://www.intereuro.eu/ (accessed 4 December 2013).

2 For a summary of the latest debates on the role of women in academia and political science, see the Monkey Cage gender gap symposium available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/09/30/introducing-the-monkeycage-gender-gap-symposium/ (accessed 4 December 2013).

3 Information on the Web of Knowledge is available at http://adminapps.webofknowledge.com.ezproxy.eui.eu/JCR/JCR (accessed 12 December 2013).

Additional information

Biographical notes

Adriana Bunea is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Frank R. Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.