Symposium on Terrorism and Human Rights

Jim Piazza and I put together a symposium of articles on terrorism and human rights, which has just appeared in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. You can access the articles (for free--this issue is ungated) here.

The articles tackle a range of important and difficult questions, and feature work by some really interesting scholars, as you can tell from the table of contents:

"Terrorism and Human Rights", James A. Piazza and James Igoe Walsh

"Physical Integrity Rights and Terrorism," James A. Piazza and James Igoe Walsh

"Tortured Relations: Human Rights Abuses and Counterterrorism Cooperation," Emilie Hafner-Burton and Jacob N. Shapiro

"Incarceration, Interrogation, and Counterterror: Do (Liberal) Democratic Institutions Constrain Leviathan?" Will Moore

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Liberal Tradition and Obama's Counterterrorism Policy" Michael C. Desch

"Does the Fear of Terrorists Trump the Fear of Persecution in Asylum Outcomes in the Post–September 11 Era?"

Jennifer S. Holmes and Linda Camp Keith

"U.S. Public Opinion on Torture, 2001–2009"

Paul Gronke, Darius Rejali, Dustin Drenguis, James Hicks, Peter Miller and Bryan Nakayama

"Death Becomes Her: Women, Occupation, and Terrorist Mobilization"

Mia Bloom

Spamming Google Scholar

In response to an earlier post on searching within Google Scholar results, the nice people at SciPlore alerted me to their new paper on how easy it is to spam Scholar. They conclude that it is "very easy" to accomplish this, and especially easy to manipulate the service's citation counts. Their suggestion is to use data and citation counts from Scholar "with care".

The big advantage that Google Scholar has is that it is far easier to use than many other services. This is because it loads in any browser, does not require a subscription, and works in the same way as the search engines we use all of the time. But if spamming and manipulation are really common, it might mean that the service has two problems. One is that it might not return all of the relevant documents, or might rank them in ways that do not reflect their true impact on the field. A second is that it could be a problem to use Scholar to assess the influence of any particular author. This latter point count be an issue if anyone uses Scholar to gauge the impact of someone applying for a job or grant or for tenure or promotion.

You can read the entire paper here.

The prisoner's dilemma (comic book version)