Citation patterns in economics and beyond

Abstract

ArgumentIn this paper we comparatively explore three claims concerning the disciplinary character of economics by means of citation analysis. The three claims under study are: (1) economics exhibits strong forms of institutional stratification and, as a byproduct, a rather pronounced internal hierarchy; (2) economists strongly conform to institutional incentives; and (3) modern mainstream economics is a largely self-referential intellectual project mostly inaccessible to disciplinary or paradigmatic outsiders. The validity of these claims is assessed by means of an interdisciplinary comparison of citation patterns aiming to identify peculiar characteristics of economic discourse. In doing so, we emphasize that citation data can always be interpreted in different ways, thereby focusing on the contrast between a “cognitive” and an “evaluative” approach towards citation data.

The authors of economics journals revisited: evidence from a large-scale replication of Hodgson and Rothman (1999)

“…As such our study not only ties in to related work in bibliometrics on concentration and insularity in economic research (Aistleitner et al, 2019;Glötzl and Aigner, 2019;Wallace et al, 2012), but also relates to the broader literature on hierarchy and stratification in economics (Fourcade et al, 2015) and its impact on the discipline's conceptual, institutional and demographic diversity (Corsi et al, 2019). In this context we suppose that some simultaneity is at work: the quest for publishing in highly regarded top 5 journals (Attema et al, 2014;Serrano, 2018;Sutter and Kocher, 2001), the tendency to treat citations as the 'currency of our industry' (Coffman et al, 2017; see also Hamermesh, 2018) and the strong focus on rankings to evaluate economists or economics departments (e.g.…”

“…For instance, Glötzl and Aigner (2019) also argue that concentration in economics has increased over time (which indeed would make economists distinct from most other sciences; see Larivière et al (2009)). Aistleitner et al (2019) analyze citation patterns in top 5 journals across various disciplines and find that the share of intra-group self-citations among these outlets is almost twice as large in economics than in other social science disciplines. Moreover, they present evidence that economists more strongly tend to conform to institutional incentives that arise in the context of journal rankings (see also Nederhof (2008) for the case of Dutch economists), e.g.…”

Paradigms and policies: the state of economics in the German-speaking countries

“…The first of these three findings indicates that the "elite in the profession" (as invoked by Colander et al, 2004: 490) are composed of comparably narrow groups of interrelated departments (Fourcade et al, 2015;Hodgson and Rothman, 1999), journals (Aistleitner et al, 2019;Heckman and Moktan, 2020) and actors (Colussi, 2018). However, this rather close-knit network has a comparatively strong imprint on the profession, as economists tend to focus on the top of their discipline, which is evidenced by the fact that the concentration of citations in economics is actually increasing over time (Gl€ otzl and Aigner, 2019), whereas it is decreasing for most other fields in the social and natural sciences (Larivi ere et al, 2009).…”

Peculiarities of gender disambiguation and ordering of non-English authors’ names for Economic papers beyond core databases①

“…Most papers in internationally recognized journals are characterized by cross-gender collaboration. This can be seen as the manifestation of the so-called reactivity of the Ukrainian Economics discipline (see Aistleitner et al, 2019;Sasvári et al, 2019). One can speculate about the adaptive publishing behavior: a different publishing or even research strategy is chosen depending on the level of recognition and audience of the target journal.…”