Economic methodology: a bibliometric perspective

ABSTRACT

Using tools from social network analysis, we study citation patterns since the early 1990s in the two most important journals in economic methodology (aka philosophy of economics). We mostly focus on assessing four historical claims in the existing interpretive literature. In agreement with the literature, we find that (1) it is sensible to split the field along three dimensions (corresponding to action theory, ethics and philosophy of science) and that (2) the interest for general philosophical questions (known as Big M) has steadily declined. Contra the literature, we find that (3) there is no move away from heterodox economics in the main journals: no significant interest was present to begin with. Finally, we update the literature regarding an alleged move toward the study of mainstream pluralism: (4) although this direction describes well the early 2000s, the field in the 2010s is better characterized as mainly fascinated by behavioral economics.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientometrics
• bibliometrics
• economic methodology
• philosophy of economics
• quantitative history

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• B4
• B29

Acknowledgments

We thank Luis Mireles-Flores, co-author on the companion chapter, for his input to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In a companion paper (Claveau et al., 2020), we use other bibliometric methods and a larger corpus to compare the field of economic methodology with work tagged as ‘Economic Methodology’ by the American Economic Association (with the JEL codes).

2 For more information on our corpus and for a contrast with another way to define economic methodology (not as a field, but as a type of work in the eyes of the American Economic Association), please see Claveau et al. (2020) and its Technical Appendix. The url for this technical appendix is: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4306372.

3 In our companion paper (Claveau et al., 2020), we use bibliographic coupling instead for the network – i.e. nodes are citing articles and they are linked to the extent that they cite the same documents.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the financial support of CIRST, of Canada Research Chairs [950-230644] and of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [430-2016-00758].

Notes on contributors

Alexandre Truc

Alexandre Truc is a postdoctral researcher at the CNRS (GREDEG-Nice) and an associate researcher at CIRST (UQAM-Montréal).

François Claveau

François Claveau holds the Canada Research Chair in Applied Epistemology in the Department of Philosophy and Applied Ethics at Université de Sherbrooke. He is the director of the Bureau des Initiatives Numériques (BIN) and a regular member of CIRST.

Olivier Santerre

Olivier Santerre has a MA in Philosophy and now studies in Computer Science. He is a junior analyst at the Bureau des Initiatives Numériques (BIN), a research unit of CIRST.