Abstract
How do new ideas emerge in academic contexts and what forces determine which ideas get selected and which are forgotten? We analyze more than 1,600 papers presented at the ANPEC Brazilian Economics Meetings from 2013 to 2019 using topic modeling and relative entropy measures. In contrast to simply counting citations or reference combinations, these methods explore the information in the actual texts to detect the rise of new patterns and whether these patterns persist once they have been established. We find that novelty is highly correlated with transience so that most new ideas are quickly forgotten. However, of the ideas that persist those that are more novel have a higher impact. We show that our text-based measure of impact is correlated with subsequent citations. Our results provide a metric to compare the nature of research at the level of Brazilian Economics departments as well as for individual researchers. Finally, we analyze how the selection procedures for the ANPEC meetings affect the incentives for economists to pursue more novel or conventional research.
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