The importance of access to high-quality information for modern political science research

The article shows that within the framework of political science research both abroad and in Russia, methodological issues have traditionally been given great attention. At the same time, the analysis of the problems of access to high-quality information is in the background. For example, working with statistics is usually perceived by political scientists only as a characteristic feature of a small segment of research related to quantitative modeling, although most political science publications should, in the author’s opinion, rely on the use of statistics, taking into account its inaccuracy and inconsistency. In particular, data on Russian commodity trade with the BRICS member countries of the global South (including the «newcomers» joining in 2024), as well as states producing large GDP, but still remaining outside the association, are given. The second important problem of access to information for political scientists is connected with researchers’ neglect of the scientific conclusions from monographs of the second half of the 20 th century. The article emphasizes that the lack of easy access to the texts of relevant books determines the absence of interest to such monographs. Therefore, as in the case of statistics, measures are proposed to overcome existing problems, including through the activation of the work of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INION). Finally, the examples of the research topics of elections and elites show the ignoring of urgent tasks only on the grounds that they require the painstaking work of a scientist, that is, they belong to a «slow» science that does not allow to publish a large number of articles quickly and report on a grant.

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