The use of online resources in political science research has been steadily growing in the last decades. Among the online research tolls, web surveys have apparently been increasingly used. Notwithstanding this perception, little is known regarding the patterns of this trend. Aiming at contributing to fulfil this gap, we characterize the scope and profile of the research using online surveys in political science. We use a meta-analysis supporting on a broad sample of articles using web surveys published in international academic journals (a total of 211 articles, 229 web survey studies, and 17 journals), between 2005 and 2015. This time span covers a period when the internet usage among researchers supposedly knew a significant growth. Our goal is to characterize how online surveys have been used in this past decade in political science, supporting on two main dimensions of analysis: the scope, regarding the geographical and chronologic aspects of the research; and the profile, reporting to the methodological features and the goals of the research.

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online research resources,online surveys,political science,meta-analysis