Small world: Narrow, wide, and long replication of Goyal, van der Leij and Moraga‐Gonzélez (JPE 2006) and a comparison of EconLit and Scopus

Abstract

Summary I undertake a narrow, wide, and long replication of Goyal, van der Leij and Moraga‐Gonzélez (2006, https://doi.org/10.1086/500990). Using social network analysis, they show that the Economics profession gradually evolved into a small world. Small worlds (or small world networks) have unique information transmission capabilities. The trend is explained by the emergence of frequently publishing researchers with many distinct co‐authors. In a social network, they resemble stars. The original results are robust to the usage of (I) another software, (II) a recent version of the originally used data, and (III) another database and a more sophisticated author disambiguation.

Journal of Economic Literature Codes Classification System (JEL)

“…The system is used to classify articles, dissertations, books, book reviews, and working papers in EconLit and in many other applications." 13 As described, EconLit is a specialized database for economics literature and is maintained by the AEA (Ekwurzel and Saffran 1985;Ekwurzel 1995;Millhorn 2000;Zhang and Su 2018;Rose 2021) whereas Scopus has more sophisticated author disambiguation. Table 1 illustrates how the main classes of the JEL code system have evolved over time, and Table 4 presents the current number of different-level JEL codes.…”