Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who Is the Most Central of Them All?

Georg, Co-Pierre; Rose, Michael E.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2709107

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 376 publications

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“…Network analysis is increasingly used by sociologists and economists to represent and analyze social interactions, including scholarly interactions among economists, on which I focus here (Goyal, 2016; Jackson et al ., 2017). The bulk of these works consider networks of coauthorship among economists (Goyal et al ., 2006; Fafchamps et al ., 2010; Cainelli et al ., 2012; Ductor et al ., 2014; Besancenot et al ., 2016; Molina et al ., 2016) or in the finance field (Georg and Rose, 2016a, 2016b); some also consider their potential impact on other variables, such as researchers’ productivity.…”

Section: The Literature On Citations Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Many‐citedness”: Citations Measure More Than Just Scientific Quality

D’Ippoliti

2021

Journal of Economic Surveys

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Citation counts are increasingly used to create rankings of scholars or institutions: while social scientists are often skeptical of the resulting indexes, economists have mostly been supporters of this approach. Yet, citation metrics have raised two debates in the literature: empirical, regarding their technical use, and theoretical, regarding their meaning and, more generally, the meaning of “scientific quality.” I review this literature highlighting the consequences for the use of citations for research assessment. As an application, I further study the network of citations of publications indexed in Web of Science, authored by all Italian academic economists between 2011 and 2015. I find that the probability of a citation between any two authors depends on similarity in their methods and topics but also, significantly, on various measures of social community and even of ideological proximity. The influence of social relations does not cancel out in the aggregate, as total citations to an individual depend on their network centrality. In the case of economics, citations cannot be interpreted as unbiased proxies of scientific quality.

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Section: The Literature On Citations Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Many‐citedness”: Citations Measure More Than Just Scientific Quality

D’Ippoliti

2021

Journal of Economic Surveys

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“…Subsequent works have developed mostly into two streams of literature: Some works used network analysis to identify and describe communities of influential academics and/or specific issues or schools of thought; others considered the relevance of network connections to explain individual economists' performance, for example, in terms of productivity or citations. Within the first mentioned stream, Galofré‐Vilà (2020) analyses the community of economic historians, Georg and Rose (2016) financial economists, Glötzl and Aigner (2018) the economists based at the Universities of Vienna and Helgadóttir (2016) the ‘Bocconi boys’. In several cases, citation networks in this stream of literature have been analysed not among individual economists but rather at the journal level (e.g., by Cronin, 2008; or Baccini et al, 2020), institution level (Önder & Terviö, 2015) or paper level (e.g., by Seabrooke et al, 2015).…”

Section: The Literature On Citation Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social determinants of citations: An empirical analysis of UK economists

D'Ippoliti,

Gobbi,

Mongeau Ospina

et al. 2023

Kyklos

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We investigate to what extent personal proximity and similarity in professional and political attributes, besides scientific factors, help explaining citations between economists. We do so by using a unique dataset of all academic economists based in the United Kingdom, created specifically for this study by merging RePEc data on works published in the past four decades with information collected by manually processing their curriculum vitae (CVs). We investigate directed citations within each pair of authors active in a same year, finding that social factors play an important role as predictors of citations. An author is systematically more likely to cite another economist not only if they work on similar topics, but most relevantly if they have been co‐authors, faculty colleagues, alumni of the same Alma Mater, and even if they express similar political views. The implication is that citations do not signal the intrinsic quality of research outputs only, but they also capture social and professional connections. When citation counts are used to reward academics, economists have an incentive to join many and large professional communities as doing so would increase their predicted citations.

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Using Network Centrality to Inform Our View of Nobel Economists

Huston

Spencer

2018

Eastern Econ J

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Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who Is the Most Central of Them All?

Cited by 5 publications

References 376 publications

“Many‐citedness”: Citations Measure More Than Just Scientific Quality

“Many‐citedness”: Citations Measure More Than Just Scientific Quality

Social determinants of citations: An empirical analysis of UK economists

Using Network Centrality to Inform Our View of Nobel Economists

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