A Bibliometric Portrait of Contemporary History of Economic Thought

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to apply bibliometrics for describing the ways in which scholars do their work in the history of economic thought (HET) field. The field is operationally defined as limited to the research articles published in the six professional journals indexed in the Web of Science database, namely History of Political Economy, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, History of Economic Ideas, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, History of Economic Thought and Policy. HET represents a small and stable niche in the economic literature, with a production relatively concentrated in a few countries. Writing HET is a male individual enterprise, and collaboration in the form of multi-authored papers is rather uncommon. Books still represent a big part of the primary sources used by HET. Historians cite a relatively small number of journals, and references are relatively concentrated.