The Internationalization of Economic History: A Puzzle

Abstract

The internationalization of economic history is everywhere except in the publication outputs. Using a new dataset of publications in the top four economic history journals, we investigate this puzzle and attempt to explain why relatively few papers on and from developing countries are published in top journals despite the growing internationalization of economic history more broadly. We find little evidence to suggest that this is due to a bias against papers on developing country topics and by developing country authors. Developing country papers and authors also do not perform worse in citation analyses. Authors from developing countries, it seems, are less productive, or discouraged from submitting their papers to top quality journals, choosing instead local journals. This journal aims to reduce this disparity.

Keywords:

• internationalization
• publication output
• developing countries
• citation analysis
• journals

JEL classification:

• A11
• A14

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank Joerg Baten, Stephen Broadberry, Latika Chaudhary, Claude Diebolt, Ewout Frankema, Alfonso Herranz, Alex Klein, Se Yan and Jan Luiten van Zanden for valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version, and Jan Greyling for excellent research assistance.

Notes

3 RePEc (research papers in economics) list of most cited papers in economics. “Colonial origins” has 1332 citations, according to the RePEc citation calculator. RePEc and Google Scholar citation information correct as of 10 February 2014.

4 These top four are Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, Economic History Review, and European Review of Economic History. Allen's paper had received 484 Google Scholar citations as of 10 February 2014.

5 We assumed a one-year lag in publication time.

6 There are exceptions, of course. See Fourie 2014.

7 We found 141 articles in the AER between 2000 and 2013 with “history” listed as subject.