| Abstract: |
Pluralism has become a central issue not only in the public discourse but also
in heterodox economics, as the focus on impact factors and rankings based on
citations continues to increase. This marketization of science has been an
institutional vehicle for the economic mainstream to promote its ideas.
Citations thus have become a central currency in economics as a discipline. At
the same time they allow to investigate patterns in the discourse. Analyzing
articles published by the two major economics departments and the more
interdisciplinary Department for Socioeconomics in Vienna, this paper is novel
in applying both bibliometric techniques and citation network analysis on the
department level. We find that (1) Articles in heterodox journals strongly
reference the economic mainstream, while the mainstream does not cite
heterodox journals, (2) Articles written by researchers of the Department of
Socioeconomics cite more heterodox journals irrespective of whether they are
published in mainstream or heterodox journals, (3) The economics departments
display a citation network exhibiting a clear "mainstream core - heterodox
periphery" structure, as Dobusch & Kapeller (2012b) suggest the overall
discourse in economics to be, while the Department of Socioeconomics could be
described as a plural though not pluralistic department with many distinct
modules in the network , reflecting various disciplines, topics and schools of
thought. (authors' abstract) |