Small World: Narrow, Wide and Long Replication of Goyal, Van Der Leij and Moraga-González (JPE 2006) and a Comparison of Econlit and Scopus

Abstract

I undertake a narrow, wide and long replication of Goyal, van der Leij and Moraga-González (Journal of Political Economy 2006; 114(2): 403–412). Using social network analysis they show that the Economics profession gradually evolved into a small world. Small worlds (or small world networks) have unique information transmission capabilities. The trend is explained by the emergence of frequently publishing researchers with many distinct co-authors. In a social network they resemble stars. The original results are robust to the usage of (I) another software, (II) a recent version of the originally used data, and (III) another database and a more sophisticated author disambiguation.

Keywords: social network, small world, Economics