Human rights issues are closely connected to a range of political processes, from democracy and conflict resolution to judicial accountability and terrorism. Despite the dramatic growth of the human rights field in recent years, however, it remains unclear how much the subject has influenced political science scholarship. I assess this question by examining broad publishing trends, namely human rights articles in the discipline's leading journals.

Times change, and so do research methods; gone are the days of researching with index cards. While academics may be slow to adopt emerging citation technology, the reference manager field is blazing ahead. This article explains what reference managers are, addresses their emergence in and potential impact on academe, and profiles a newcomer to the field: Zotero. We close by surveying and contrasting Zotero's features with those of its staunchest competitors: EndNote and RefWorks.

For the first time in its history, the APSA Annual Meeting and Exhibition will be held outside of the continental United States. Held September 3–6, 2009, in Toronto, this marks the 105th assembly of the world's largest annual gathering of political scientists. The meeting will feature over 800 panels organized by 49 thematic divisions, 66 related groups, APSA committees, and presidential task forces, as well as more than 200 meetings and receptions. In addition to division and related group panels, program chairs Simone Chambers of the University of Toronto and Bruce Jentleson of Duke University will present a series of theme panels and plenary sessions that will focus on the meeting's theme, “Politics in Motion: Change and Complexity in the Contemporary Era.”

This report was the first to be prepared by the UCLA-based team of co-editors that took over leadership of the Review in July 2007 from Lee Sigelman, who had edited it for the previous six years. Here we report on the journal's operations during the year from July 1, 2007, to June 30, 2008, including both decisions made during the early months by Lee, as he closed up shop, and those made by the new team. Because revisions often take authors many months to complete, the time span between original submission and final acceptance of an article can be long. As a result, the issues of the journal published between mid-2007 and mid-2008 owe at least as much to Lee as they do to us—indeed, of the articles accepted during those 12 months, 83% either had been accepted by Lee or came to us as revised versions of papers he had initially handled, almost all of which we accepted. So our first task is to acknowledge the extremely important contribution Lee made to the publication in this transitional year, even as he was beginning a well-deserved rest. We are grateful to Lee for all his help, and our respect for his management skills only increases with time.

In 1970, Victoria Schuck reported in PS on female participation at our annual meetings from 1959 to 1969. Ever since 1972 I have written on the gender participation balance at our annual meetings, at first as a letter, later as a regularly appearing note in this publication. This fall is the thirty-seventh time I reported to the association membership about the tally. (Since I retired at the end of the 2007–08 academic year, I hope someone else will continue the number crunching.)

Unlike most APSA CFP participants, I am not a mid-career academic, journalist, federal employee, or health care professional. I am a Ph.D. candidate in political science, smack in the midst of my dissertation research, which generated job-search needs that are quite a bit different than my colleagues. Most are here on a sort of sabbatical from their current career or even seeking to explore a possible career change. They are looking for positions that will immerse them in the life of a congressional staffer, some even desiring the 70-hour-a-week “Hill lifestyle.”

Surveys indicate that there is more interest today in politics among college students than has been the case in the recent past. This article describes a multidisciplinary freshman seminar aimed at using that interest to promote student engagement and the Reacting to the Past simulations at the course's center.

This article illustrates the profound learning that occurs—for students and instructor alike—when a class on third-world development attempts to undertake foreign aid. With undergraduate, graduate, and departmental money, I purchased bulls and carts for farmers, and goats for widows, in two West African villages. Such experiential learning personalized for students the study of micropolitics under conditions of poverty, the development of organizational structure, and north-south dependency.

As the world has grown more interconnected, many political science programs have added courses on international law, international organizations, the laws of war and peace, international human rights, and comparative judicial politics. While in many cases these are relatively new offerings within international studies, all of these subjects have long been part of the law school curriculum. There is, therefore, a long pedagogical history to be examined in terms of the techniques and content used in law schools to teach these courses. This paper examines a number of these techniques and discusses how they may be used in political science courses to enhance student learning opportunities.

We suggest that Book Five of the Republic, where Plato discusses the status of women in the guardian class, is a superb source of Platonic insight. For it is precisely the discussion of women that is most vulnerable to co-optation by the modern vernacular of interest, a vernacular to which the Republic is vehemently opposed. If students come to appreciate an alternative perspective regarding this most sensitive of modern issues, the full impact of the Socratic approach is available to them.