Leaders among the leaders in Economics: a network analysis of the Nobel Prize laureates

ABSTRACT

We analyse the production and networks of Nobel laureates in Economics, employing the Normalized Impact Factor (NIF) of their publications in the Journal of Citation Report (Economics), to identify the academic leaders among those laureates awarded between 1969 and 2016. Our results indicate that direct collaborations among laureates are, in general, rare, but when we add all the co-authors of the laureates, there appears a very large component containing 70% of the nodes, so that more than two thirds of the laureates can be connected through only two steps. Deaton, Tirole, Arrow, and Stiglitz are identified as leaders according to the total production of their respective networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Nobel prize
• Economics
• impact factor
• research production
• complex networks

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A11
• C45

Acknowledgments

This paper was partially written while Jose Alberto Molina was Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics of Boston College (US), to which he would like to express his thanks for the hospitality and facilities provided. We thank Web of Science for permission to publish the analysis of these data on the web page research.kampal.com. We want to thank Alfredo Ferrer and J. Ignacio Giménez-Nadal for their help in some aspects of the data treatment and visualization.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Notes

¹ The impact of the journal in the year of publication of each paper is a quality measure very frequently used in the academic disciplines. We agree with the controversy with respect to the use of citations as a quality indicator (e.g., Bordons et al., 2002; Van-Leeuwen and Moed 2005; Egghe 2009) and, consequently, we have employed an improved version of the IF, the NIF, that is implemented very efficiently. Additionally, citations produce other methodological concerns in computing the specific value of the indicator, such as the inclusion, or not, of self-citations, or the different value of one citation corresponding to a WP or to a Q1 journal, among others.

Additional information

Funding

This paper has benefited from funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy (FIS2015-65078-C2-2-P) and the Aragon Government (research groups E30_17R and S32_17R).