Welcome to GRADS!

We are two political science faculty who created GRADS (The GRaduate Assignments DataSet) as part of a research project on gender representation in graduate training in political science. GRADS includes 88,673 readings from 65 Ph.D.-level reading lists and 840 syllabi from Ph.D.-level political science courses taught in the United States. The full dataset includes not only citations, but also data at the level of syllabi, instructors, and departments/universities. At present, we are making public a searchable dataset of the citations, with author gender; a full, anonymized dataset will be made available in 2019. For now, we invite you to access our replication dataset here for one of our recent publications on the subject.

How Can You Use this Dataset?

• You may be curious as to what your colleagues are assigning. In the title bar, you can use keywords to discover readings on specific subjects of interest. You can also search readings by subfield, or by author gender.
• You can find new readings to add to your own syllabi. You can diversify your syllabus or comprehensive exam reading list by author gender, or by other criteria.
• You can assess trends and disciplinary emphases by seeing which readings are cited more or less frequently. The search function will tell you the number of times each reading is assigned within our dataset.

Funding
This project was possible due to generous funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the University of California, Irvine School of Social Sciences. We are also grateful for the assistance and support of numerous individuals as indicated on the Acknowledgements page.

For questions or comments or if you’d like to cite our work, you can find out contact information and our research on our respective websites: Heidi Hardt (University of California, Irvine) and Amy Erica Smith (Iowa State University)

To begin using our dataset, you can click here.