The Tale of Two research Communities: The Diffusion of Research on Productive Efficiency

Finn Førsund and Nikias Sarafoglou ()

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: The field of theoretical and applied efficiency analysis is pursued both by economists and people from operational research and management science. Each group tends to cite a different paper as the seminal one. Recent availability of extensive electronically accessible databases of journal articles makes studies of the diffusion of papers through citations possible. Research strands inspired by the seminal paper within economics are identified and followed by citation analysis during the 20 year period before the operations research paper was published. The first decade of the operations research paper is studied in a similar way and emerging differences in diffusion patterns are pointed out. Main factors influencing citations apart from the quality of the research contribution are reputation of journal, reputation of author, number of close followers; colleagues, “cadres of protégés”, Ph.D. students, and extent of network (“invisible college”). Such factors are revealed by the citing papers. In spite of increasing cross contacts between economics and operations research the last decades co-citation analysis reveals a relative constant tendency to stick to “own camp” references.

Keywords: Farrell efficiency measures; data envelopment analysis; DEA; bibliometry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B21 D24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-net
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The tale of two research communities: The diffusion of research on productive efficiency (2005)
Working Paper: The Tale of two Research Communities: The Diffusion of Research on Productive Efficiency (2003)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usi:wpaper:446

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