nep-sog New Economics Papers
on Sociology of Economics
Issue of 2018‒01‒08
four papers chosen by
Jonas Holmström
Axventure AB

  1. The Most Cited Articles from the Top-5 Journals (1991-2015) By Laurent Linnemer; Michael Visser
  2. How to Count Citations If You Must: Comment By David I. Stern; Richard S.J. Tol
  3. Measuring Influence in Science: Standing on the Shoulders of Which Giants? By Antonin Macé
  4. The purge of fascist university professors. The case of economists By Daniela Giaconi

  1. By: Laurent Linnemer (CREST - Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique - INSEE - ENSAE ParisTech - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique); Michael Visser (CREST - Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique - INSEE - ENSAE ParisTech - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique)
    Abstract: This paper documents what are the most cited articles published in the top-5 economics journals during the period 1991-2015. EconLit is used to collect bibliographic information about these articles, and we gathered yearly citations for each article through the Web of Science database. We present different sorts of citation lists. Our most basic one ranks articles on the basis of the cumulated number of citations received between year of publication and 2015. To facilitate the comparison of articles of different ages, we also consider rankings by subperiods, and on the basis of normalized citations per year. Finally we report lists by field of economic research, as defined by the JEL codes of the articles. The paper contains Internet links to all articles, allowing an easy and direct access to arguably the most influential economics literature published in the last 25 years.
    Date: 2017–11–14
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01634432&r=sog
  2. By: David I. Stern (Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University); Richard S.J. Tol (Department of Economics, University of Sussex; Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam; Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam; Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam; CESifo, Munich)
    Abstract: Perry and Reny (2016) show that the Euclidean length of a citation list satisfies five axioms including "depth relevance". We explore "breadth relevance", which favors consistent achievers over one-hit wonders. A convex combination of depth and breadth relevant citation metrics does not satisfy the independence axiom, but violations are rare. We estimate the parameters of this metric using two datasets and three rankings, controlling for cohort effects. We find that simply counting citations--neither breadth nor depth--maximizes the correlation between citation index and department rank. However, depth may explain the allocation of researchers across lower ranked departments.
    Keywords: research assessment; citations
    JEL: A14 C43
    Date: 2018–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sus:susewp:0118&r=sog
  3. By: Antonin Macé (GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - ECM - Ecole Centrale de Marseille)
    Abstract: I study the measurement of the influence of scientists based on bibliographic data. I propose a new measure that accounts for indirect influence and allows to compare scientists across different fields of science. By contrast, common measures of influence that “count citations”, such as the h-index, are unable to satisfy either of these two properties. I use the axiomatic method in two opposite ways: to highlight the two limitations of citation- counting schemes and their independence, and to carefully justify the assumptions made in the construction of the proposed measure.
    Keywords: intellectual influence,networks,comparability across fields,axiomatic method
    Date: 2017–11
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01630095&r=sog
  4. By: Daniela Giaconi (Dipartimento di Economia e Management - Università di Pisa)
    Abstract: The aim of this presentation proposes a first reasoned overview of the results of a new study of documents archive of the National Purge Commission of Universities Professors (in Italian: Commissione Nazionale di Epurazione del Personale Universitario) deposited at the Central State Archive in Rome. It is focused on the whole segment of economists which, up til now, has been considered only for some aspects linked to personal stories of the single scientists. This new research serves to demonstrate that in the personal files of the thirty-eight economists analysed, beyond the individual trial pathways, there is a common thread in their strategy of defence that makes them indistinguishable from their colleagues of the other subjects. In concrete terms, inside the purge of economists exist several situations, similar to those of the branches of knowledge under trial; they repeat acts of defence that are apart from their expert knowledge and their proper and specialized terms well fit together with the conceptual framework delineating purge as a rite-of-passage to the new Republic, but without hangover for their careers.
    Abstract: Questo contributo propone una prima delucidazione ragionata degli esiti di una nuova esplorazione del fondo della Commissione Nazionale di Epurazione del Personale Universitario dell’Archivio Centrale dello Stato, focalizzata sull’intero segmento degli economisti che, finora, era stato valutato soltanto in alcuni lavori centrati sulle vicende personali di singoli scienziati. La nuova ricerca è tesa a dimostrare che nei fascicoli personali dei trentotto economisti esaminati, al di là dei singoli percorsi processuali, esiste una trama comune nella loro strategia di difesa che li rende indistinguibili dai colleghi delle altre materie. In pratica, dentro l’epurazione gli economisti vivono situazioni affini a quelle di tutte le classi disciplinari processate, ripetono gesti di difesa che prescindono dal loro sapere specialistico e i loro vocaboli di elezione si incastrano perfettamente in un quadro concettuale teso a delineare l’epurazione come una sorta di rito di passaggio verso la nuova Repubblica ma senza strascichi per il procedere delle carriere.
    Date: 2017–10–27
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01625586&r=sog

This nep-sog issue is ©2018 by Jonas Holmström. It is provided as is without any express or implied warranty. It may be freely redistributed in whole or in part for any purpose. If distributed in part, please include this notice.
General information on the NEP project can be found at http://nep.repec.org. For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at <director@nep.repec.org>. Put “NEP” in the subject, otherwise your mail may be rejected.
NEP’s infrastructure is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand.