Using Network Centrality to Inform Our View of Nobel Economists

Bibliometric Techniques and Their Use in Business and Economics Research

“…And what about non‐western economic giants such as Japan, India, and China (Wang et al ., 2011; Mukhopadhyay et al ., 2014; Bonilla et al ., 2015)? Influence of topics which led to a Nobel Prize (Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences). Arguably winning a Nobel Prize is the most visible form of recognition (Huston and Spencer, 2018). How then do awardees fare from a bibliometric point of view?…”

Who is the most sought‐after economist? Ranking economists using Google Trends

“…Interestingly there is very little correlation between the year of the Nobel Prize and the Google Trends rank (or the Google Trends score, see Figure 4). 23 Alternative methods to compare Nobel Prize winners can be found in the studies by Prinz (2017), who used the number of "hits" that a search in Google returns (i.e., a proxy for the number of web pages that contain the name of the Nobel Prize winner), and Huston and Spencer (2018), who used network centrality. 24 Note that the trimmed average rank for Arthur Lewis is artificially low and due to rounding: the Google Doodle increased interest so much that his search intensity in other periods was rounded to zero.…”

“…There is a long tradition in economics, and other disciplines, of ranking economists in terms of their output (see, for example, Coupé, 2003; Faria et al, 2007; Franses, 2014; Huston & Spencer, 2018; Lo et al, 2008; Sturm & Ursprung, 2017). Besides being a source of entertainment, such rankings have been argued to stimulate competition among economists and to provide both insiders, like economics departments considering hiring an economist, and outsiders, like journalists, public servants or graduate students, with low‐cost information (see, e.g., Medoff, 1989, or Osterloh & Frey, 2015, and the references therein).…”