Research Priorities in the History of Economics Forty Years Later

Abstract

The main purpose of this essay is to discuss the degree to which articles in HOPE have responded to Professor Coats's priorities. But first, please allow me to digress for a brief space and point out that Professor Coats's article was, to some degree, unusual. Although many inaugural issues of subdisciplinary journals contain brief statements announcing the founding of the journal and its purpose, not all open with a formal statement of the questions most in need of answers. Three that did were the

Macroeconomics under Pressure: The Feedback Effects of Economic Expertise

“…This observation might be the reason why "Bob" Coats (1969) identified "the role of economists in governments" as one of his famous "research priorities" for the history of economic thought. It took a while, however, before this subject matter became a research priority, at least in History of Political Economy (Coats 1983;Dudenhefer 2009;Edwards 2020). Economic expertise has increasingly been investigated in recent years, and thanks to the impulse of science studies.…”

Impact Factor Pressures, Scientific Practices, and the Place of Survey Articles in the History of Economics

“…We have checked the classification ofPaganelli (2015),Fontaine (2016),Bianchi (2016),Schumacher et al (2017),Duarte and Giraud (2016), andDudenhefer (2009), and all these survey articles have indeed been classified by Clarivate as "articles," not as "reviews." To the best of our knowledge, there is no explanation by Clarivate as to why they did not classify history of economics surveys as "reviews."…”