On What Topics Does the Scientific Community Cooperate in Defense Economics? A Science Mapping of the First 30 Years of the Journal Defence and Peace Economics

ABSTRACT

The academic journal Defence and Peace Economics, which celebrated its pearl jubilee in 2024, is acknowledged as the leading journal in defense economics, bringing together a scientific community of authors from a diverse array of countries. We conduct a bibliometric study using science mapping to analyze the evolution of author networks and research themes within the journal from 1994 to 2023. Analyzing 1069 articles, our findings reveal a growing internationalization of the journal, alongside an increasing diversification of topics. However, we observe a decrease in the rate of international co-authorship during the most recent period of our analysis, i.e. 2019-2023. The core of the publications remains focused on military spending and its interconnection with economic growth. Moreover, our analysis points to themes related to technology, innovation, and R&D in the defense industry as research opportunities.

KEYWORDS:

• Science mapping
• defence and peace economics
• SPAR-4-SLR
• Scopus
• bibliometrix

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F50
• H56

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. The journal was formerly known as Defence Economics between 1990 and 1993.

2. As can be observed in the organizing code mentioned in table 1, we excluded from the retrieval process on Scopus conference papers (46), appearing as ‘cp’ in the organizing code, editorials (19), appearing as ‘ed’, and erratums (5), appearing as ‘er’. As this exclusion was done in the retrieval process, we do not mention this information in the section 2.1 dedicated to arranging stage that consists in explaining the process of articles exclusion after the retrieval process.

3. Zupic and Čater (2015) recommend a maximum duration of 5 years for bibliographic coupling analysis periods. This is the duration we have selected, which seemed pertinent given that the average age of the journal’s publications is 11.9 years over the period 1994-2023 and 8.54 years over the period 2004-2023. By choosing a 5-year period, we can legitimately assume to capture recent trends in the journal’s publications.

4. The centrality reported on the horizontal axis of the graph in Figure 15 is Callon’s centrality index (Callon, Courtial, and Laville 1991). This centrality value measures the strength of external ties of the set of themes in a thematic cluster to other themes and can thus be considered a measure of the significance of the set of themes in the development of the entire research domains of the journal under study (Aria and Cuccurullo n.d.-b). The impact reported on the vertical axis is a normalized global citation score of the authors constituting a thematic cluster, calculated by dividing the actual count of citations of these authors by the expected citation rate for authors with the same year of publication considering the whole bibliographic database (Aria and Cuccurullo n.d.-c). As a global measure of impact, it enables assessment of the impact of a thematic cluster across the different research themes (Mukherjee et al. 2022) of the journal under study. Regarding the diameter of the circles of the different thematic clusters, it increases with the number of authors constituting these clusters. Consequently, we can infer from the observation of Figure 15 that the themes studied by the authors of the thematic cluster located in the upper-left quadrant are among the themes studied in the most highly cited recent articles of the journal but are relatively less connected to other themes studied in the journal. In contrast, the themes studied by the authors of the five thematic clusters located in the upper-right quadrant are among the themes analyzed in the most highly cited articles and are also the most strongly connected to other themes studied in the journal. For further explanations, refer to Cobo et al. (2011) and Aria and Cuccurullo (2017; n.d.-a).