New STOREPaper

Un nuovo working paper è appena stato pubblicato nella collana degli STOREPapers, ora indicizzata su RePEc (clicca qui).

STOREPapers WP 4 2015
Maria Cristina MARCUZZO and Giulia ZACCHIA, “Is History of Economics What Historians of Economic Thought Do? A Quantitative Investigation”

This paper presents a quantitative investigation into the history of economic thought. Building on previous work (Marcuzzo 2008, 2012), we propose an empirical study in with the aim of describing the dynamics of changes in HET in recent years, detecting three trends: 1) a sort of ‘stepping down from the shoulders of giants’, namely a move towards studies of ‘minor’ figures and/or economists from a more recent past; 2) the blossoming of archival research into unpublished work and correspondence; 3) less theory-laden investigations, connecting intellectual circles, linking characters and events. Using data from Econlit we show the evolution of the overall publication of HET articles (1955-2013) and of HET fully or partially specialized journals (1993-2013); for the latter, by devising proxies which are amenable to quantitative assessment, we demonstrate that there is some evidence to support these claims.

Keywords: History of economic thought; Bibliometrics; Economics journals; History of economics; Quantitative assessment
JEL: B40, B20, A14

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