Scholarship on the Middle East has long been described as marginalized within the discipline of political science. This is in part because non-specialists view the region as culturally distinct and, therefore, the usual assumptions about human behavior and political processes are alleged not to apply to Middle Eastern polities and societies. In addition, mainstream political scientists have charged that the types of data and methods that Middle East specialists employ is outdated or anecdotal, although these contentions seem to be on the decline. Where does the field of Middle East politics stand vis-à-vis the discipline of political science? This presentation will draw on a dataset of all MENA-focused published in a selection of the “top” disciplinary journals since roughly 2000, which roughly corresponds to the beginnings of a marked shift in political science data and methods towards greater reliance on experimental and quantitative methods aimed at causal identification, among other trends. The dataset classifies articles based on a variety of attributes, including the topic or subject area (i.e., authoritarianism, Islamism, social mobilization, gender politics, etc.), cases (national, subnational or other geographic or temporal units), methods (i.e., experimental, statistical, case study, interpretive, etc.), author characteristics, and other criteria. To contextualize these descriptive findings about trends in MENA political science scholarship over the past two decades, I will attempt to gather two additional sources of information: First, based on data from the American Political Science Association and various regional studies associations, I will try to compare trends in MENA-focused scholarship with those observed in political science research based on other developing regions such as Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Second, I will attempt to assess how evolving focus areas of research reflect the priorities of scholars and citizens within the region (rather than the priorities of scholars in Western countries), ideally by creating an online survey that asks political scientists within and outside of the region about the issues they deem most pressing for research and by descriptive analyses of relevant public opinion data.