Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing: Who and How?

Daniel S. Hamermesh

No 18635, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Presenting data on all full-length articles published in the three top general economics journals for one year in each of the 1960s through 2010s, I analyze how patterns of co-authorship, age structure and methodology have changed, and what the possible causes of these changes may have been. The entire distribution of number of authors has shifted steadily rightward. In the last two decades the fraction of older authors has almost quadrupled. The top journals are now publishing many fewer papers that represent pure theory, regardless of sub-field, somewhat less empirical work based on publicly available data sets, and many more empirical studies based on data assembled for the study by the author(s) or on laboratory or field experiments.

JEL-codes: B20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hpe and nep-sog
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Journal of Economic Literature, 51(1): 162-72.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18635.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing: Who and How? (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18635

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18635

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).