Patterns of interdisciplinary citations and asymmetry between economics and the neighboring social sciences from 1959 to 2018

Abstract

This paper offers a quantitative study measuring, through citation analysis, the historical relationship between economics and the other social sciences (that is, anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology). The exercise suggested here comprehends the period from 1959 to 2018 in order to understand both whether economics has opened more space for the other social sciences and, if so, the subtleties of this process. The paper also develops an original asymmetry measure for interdisciplinarity-the Coefficient of Interdisciplinary Asymmetry.