A Quantitative History of the Journal of Economc History and the Cliometric Revolution

Abstract

What do economic historians do? I analyze quantitatively The Journal of Economic History's contents since its founding, showing subfields, nations, and periods studied, and which scholars and universities have contributed. The timing, extent, and participants of the cliometric revolution are investigated. New rankings of economic history programs are made.

Publication Trends and Future Challenges for the Australian Economic History Review: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The inclusion of econometric analysis is also strongly associated with an increase in the probability of co‐authorship. The results are consistent with the discussion by Whaples (), but not the formal results presented by Seltzer and Hamermesh (). Why would the relationship between econometrics and co‐authorship be so strikingly different in the AEHR than in the leading international economic history journals?…”

“…The growth in co‐authorship is a sufficiently striking trend that it deserves explanation. Examining the case of the JEH , Whaples () quotes Robert Fogel as stating that the nature of cliometric work facilitates specialisation and exchange. For example, junior authors may be more likely to specialise in technical data‐related work and senior authors in historical context and institutional background.…”

Economic history goes digital: topic modeling the Journal of Economic History

“…I will provide an overview of the literature using topic models which illustrates their disciplinary versatility, followed by a practical application: I use the most prominent topic model -Latent Dirichlet Allocation -to extract topics from all articles published in the Journal of Economic History (JEH) between 1941 and 2016. The results will demonstrate that topic models are just the right tool for research like the work by Robert Whaples (1991Whaples ( , 2002, who has done a topic analysis of the JEH in a more traditional fashion.…”

Is Economic History a Neglected Field of Study?

“…The significant demographic factor is that today's economic historians reside primarily in economics departments, not in history departments. The mailing addresses of the Economic History Association (EHA), the major professional organization of economic historians in the United States, indicate that about 57.8% of members are in economics departments, 16.4% in history departments, 8 ferred field. Most economic historians are hired in other subdisciplines-as a labor economist, natural resource economist, macroeconomist, financial economist or general economist, who coincidentally uses history as a laboratory.…”

“…This figure climbed to 10% in the late 1950s, 16% in the early 1960s, 43% in the late 1960s, 72% in the early 1970s, 83% in the late 1980s, and 90% by 2004. 8 This ascendance shouldn't obscure debates about how to practice cliometrics, however. Many cliometricians, led by Douglass North, argued that most early cliometric research was too wedded to static neoclassical theory, which tends to focus analysis on historical episodes and topics for which markets were important, thus placing limits on what can be examined.…”