Topics and Geographical Diffusion of Knowledge in Top Economic Journals

Abstract

We study the evolution of topics in economics and their geographical specialization by analyzing 13,233 papers from seven top journals between 1985 and 2012 and their forward citations. The share of U.S. publications declines from 75% to 64% with a corresponding increase of the European share from 12% to 24%. We use topic modeling and document the evolution of the discipline over 27 years. We estimate, with a quasi‐structural model, the citation lag distribution for 18 different topics and three large geographical areas. The modal citation lag is about 6.7 years in the entire sample and 4.8 years for citations from the top 100 journals. We quantify (1) the home bias effect in citations, (2) how it fades away over time, (3) the long lasting impact of U.S. publications vis‐à‐vis other geographical areas, and (4) the higher speed of diffusion and faster obsolescence in the United States. (JEL A14, I23, O33, A11)

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).…”

On the relation between the degree of internationalization of cited and citing publications: A field level analysis, including and excluding self-citations

“…research authored by authors from the same country)"; but this observation was not confirmed for the UK. Fontana, Montobbio and Racca (2019) investigated how the probability of citation of papers in economics is affected by the geographic location and scientific topic of each paper. Results revealed a home bias effect in citations (for example, a publication originated in Europe is 39% more likely to get a citation from an average European publication than is a random U.S. publication).…”

Knowledge spillovers: Does the geographic proximity effect decay over time? A discipline-level analysis, accounting for cognitive proximity, with and without self-citations

“…The authors also stressed some limits of the study: i) the presence of the self-citation phenomenon, which affects domestic citing of publications (Aksnes, 2003); ii) the difficulty of generalizing the results, since they deal with the field of physics, characterized by a strong rate of internationalization, meaning that in other fields there could well be stronger effects from national boundaries (Wagner, Whetsell & Leydesdorff, 2017); iii) the fact that the analysis is based on publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS), which is biased against non-English publications, meaning that the effect of national boundaries on knowledge spillover could be underestimated (Van Leeuwen, Moed, Tijssen, Visser & Van Raan, 2001). Fontana, Montobbio and Racca (2019) focused on the knowledge flows in economics, investigating how the probability of citation is affected by time since publication, and the geographic location and scientific topic of each paper. Results revealed four overlapping effects: i) there is a "home bias" effect in citations (for example a publication originating in Europe is 39% more likely to get a citation from a random European publication than from a random USA publication); ii) this effect fades over time; iii) USA publications retain a longer lasting world impact vis-à-vis other countries; iv) there is a higher speed of diffusion and faster obsolescence in the United States, i.e.…”