The Geography and Concentration of Authorship in the Top Five: Implications For European Economics

Abstract

We study to what degree authors who publish in the five most prestigious journals in economics have previously published there and in which world region they are based. Although still high, the concentration of United States-based and previously published top-five authors has decreased. This trend is driven by increased co-authorship between USA and non-USA scholars and between scholars with and without previous top-five articles. Only around 5% of all articles each year are written solely by first-time authors from outside the United States, and this share has not increased since the mid-1990s. Against this background, we argue that European institutions should be wary of putting too much emphasis on publishing in these five journals. Both the advancement and diversity of the economics discipline may otherwise suffer. 1The JIF is determined by the average number of citations that a journal's articles get over a rolling time window.

The micro‐geography of academic research: How distinctive is economics?

“…Prior studies have considered concentration in economics, especially in terms of journals and institutions but the geographical analysis is at the national level (Frey & Pommerehne, 1988) or the supra‐national level (Ek & Henrekson, 2019). As such, these studies do not highlight the fact that the production and recognition of research are even more concentrated at the micro‐geographic level within countries.…”

“…The issue of American domination in economics was also apparent in earlier studies of top journals (Kocher & Sutter, 2001) and of eminent economists (Frey & Pommerehne, 1988). Yet studies of the concentration of research that only consider national or supra‐national geography, such as Ek and Henrekson (2019), may miss an important point. The production and recognition of research are even more concentrated within countries.…”

“…This risk may be amplified in two ways. Articles in the top five journals are increasingly co‐authored between authors in the United States and those outside the United States (Ek & Henrekson, 2019). The rising share of non‐US authors in these journals is especially due to economists in Europe co‐authoring with economists in the United States.…”

Estado actual de la investigación en teoría económica del valor a nivel internacional (2019)

“…Ante el volumen de información cada vez mayor en la producción académica de la economía (Claveau y Gingras, 2016), los métodos cuantitativos de investigación han adquirido relevancia por su capacidad de procesamiento y análisis (Cherrier y Svorenčík, 2018). Dentro de ellos, la bibliometría permite evaluar calidad e impacto de la literatura científica (Sacho, 1990), al identificar niveles de auto-referenciación (Simoes y Crespo, 2020), coautoría y colaboración internacional (Molina et al, 2016;Orazbayev, 2017;Seltzer y Hamermesh, 2018), geografía y concentración de las autorías (Ek y Henrekson, 2019;Fontana, Montobbio y Racca, 2019), temas centrales y promedio de referencias por año y por artículo (Bornmann y Wohlrabe, 2019).…”

Geographical Concentration and Editorial Favoritism within the Field of Laboratory Experimental Economics (RM/19/029-revised-)

“…In the last decades, research on geographical and institutional concentration has received a lot of attention. For economic top journals, several studies show that a large but declining share of research is produced by US-based economists (Ek and Henrekson 2019, Glötzl and Aigner 2019, Kocher and Sutter 2001, Kalaitzidakis et al 1999, Hodgson and Rothman 1999, Elliott et al 1998, Frey and Pommerehne 1988.…”