1980
After its establishment, IPSA relied on its Collective members and other outlets to produce journals. Initially, IPSA disseminated association news and published congress papers through UNESCO's quarterly journal, the International Social Science Bulletin. Over time, the Bulletin transformed into the International Social Science Journal. IPSA provided these journals to members at a reduced price. Beginning in 1977, IPSA also utilized Participation as its primary method for internal communication.
At the 1976 IPSA World Congress in Edinburgh, outgoing President Jean Laponce suggested the establishment of an international political science journal as an outlet for the best work of members of the association, and he was mandated to investigate the feasibility of this suggestion. At its meeting in Rio de Janeiro on 23-26 August 1978, a contract was signed with Sage Publications, Inc., of Beverly Hills to publish a quarterly journal. The first issue of the International Political Science Review (IPSR) was published in January 1980.
The founding editor of IPSR, John Meisel, defined its target audience as the international political science community, and emphasized the centrality of this dimension:
“Our hope is that this focus will ensure its escape from one of the major weaknesses of much of current political analysis - the worse for being ubiquitously overlooked - namely, the crippling consequences of parochialism. It is remarkable that even journals which aggressively espouse comparative methodologies all too often do so within an ethnocentric and/or narrow ideological conceptual apparatus and with similarly restricted sources of data.”
The journal's objective was also to counteract the effects of increasing specialization that threatened to divert interest from global analyses of the discipline as a whole and human experience. It focused on the promotion and dissemination of broadly based analysis, avoiding internal disciplinary or other biases.
IPSR adopted the format of guest-edited and themed issues. Judging by the IPSR’s financial health and high-impact factor, the approach has paid off. The journal’s success is most notably due to the long tenure of its editors and co-editors: John Meisel (1980-1996), Jean Laponce (1986-2002), Nazli Choucri (1995-2001), James Meadowcroft (2000-2007), Kay Lawson (2001-2009), Yvonne Galligan (2006-2012), Marian Sawer (2012-2019), Mark Kesselman (2012-2016), Theresa Reidy (2016-2023), Daniel Stockemer (2019-2025), and Annika Hinze (2023-2029).
Transition to Online-only Publication
Providing IPSA members with print copies of the journal helped retain a high number of individual members from its inception until 2012. In 2012, IPSA implemented a strategy to shift all IPSR readers to the more practical and environmentally sustainable online version, which is available through the MyIPSA profile on the IPSA website.
Recognizing the outdated and costly nature of producing a widely distributed print version in the digitization of the publication industry, IPSA completed the reorientation to the online version by stopping the selling of the print version to members in 2024. This move not only reduced the environmental footprint, but also resulted in economic savings, aligning IPSA with a global trend of modernization seen in academic and professional associations moving their publishing services online.
IPSA members can access the full IPSR archive from 1980 through the My IPSA menu.
