¹ There is an intriguing question concerning the relationship between the praise of a specific work at the start of an academic career and subsequent achievement. Since we are not in a position to ascertain how well the recipients might have done had they not won the award, the question must remain unanswered. (Admittedly, in a more complete study, a control group might be selected to provide firmer evidence of the standard against which the achievements of the award winners should be judged. However, we believe that it is reasonable to assert that most experienced academics—particularly those who are required to make promotion and tenure decisions—have a general idea of what kinds and degrees of scholarship to expect from new Ph.D.s during their early years.) Those who are interested in this and related aspects of the recognition of excellence are directed to Merton's, Robert K. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 419–438.Google Scholar

² This period was selected on the assumption that by 1979 sufficient time would have elapsed for an award winner to have given substantial additional evidence that he or she was going to make a significant contribution to the discipline. (The length of time that the award winners had to fulfill the promise they demonstrated by receiving the award varied from 6 to 16 years. Obviously, we can speak with greater assurance of the fulfillment or lack of fulfillment of promise when speaking of the award winners from the early 1960s.)

³ During the 11-year period under study, there were 10 years in which awards were not made by one or another of the committees.

⁴ For a few years in which the names of the committee members had not been published, we relied on the generous assistance of Evron Kirkpatrick, Executive Director of the APSA, to identify those individuals.

⁵ One caveat must be clearly stated: Our research would not have tracked those individuals who changed their names after receiving the award. Such a change could be one explanation why, in spite of our fairly diligent efforts, we were unable to locate current academic affiliations or post-award publications for two of the three female recipients.

⁶ It should be emphasized that two of the five were women and, as previously mentioned, we may have been unsuccessful in identifying their publications because they may have married and changed their names.

⁷ One factor which cannot be adequately examined here concerns the content of the various subsequent publications. However, a brief examination of the articles and books reveals that almost every one of those recipients who did publish drew heavily on their dissertations for their first few publications. In several cases, the publications of a recipient amounted to the dissertation itself, an article (or two) derived from it, or a combination of the two.

⁸ We identified the departments from which both the award recipients and the committee members received their doctorates by consulting the listings in the Guide to Graduate Study in Political Science, the award announcements in the APSR and PS, and Dissertation Abstracts. In order to compare the number of doctorates conferred by those departments from which a substantial number of both award recipients and committee members received their degrees with the total number of doctorates conferred in the discipline, we examined Earned Degrees Conferred for the period 1962–1972. (We examined this period rather than 1963–1973 because the awards are given for dissertations completed during the previous academic year. Thus, an award given in 1966 was for a dissertation completed during the 1965–1966 academic year.)

⁹ For a discussion of the relationship between the prestige of the graduate department from which one receives his or her doctorate and subsequent academic affiliation, see Somit, Albert and Tanenhaus, Joseph, The Development of American Political Science (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1968), pp. 162–167.Google Scholar For a recent ranking of political science departments by prestige, see the Chronicle of Higher Education, January 15, 1979. The rankings from this survey are reproduced in Robey, John S., “Political Science Departments: Reputation Versus Productivity” (PS: Political Science & Politics, Spring 1979), pp. 202–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar (The reader is also directed to Roettger's, Walter B. “The Discipline: What's Right, What's Wrong, and Who Cares?” a paper presented at the 1978 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, pp. 15–18.)Google Scholar

¹⁰ A related question—one which currently cannot be answered—concerns the number and sources of the dissertations submitted to the award committees each year. We cannot know how many departments regularly submit their best dissertations each year and how many do not. However, judging by the number of committees which declined to grant awards in certain years, it is not unreasonable to surmise that the pool of applicants sometimes may be unrepresentative and unduly restricted.