| Abstract: |
Economics has the reputation to be an insular discipline with little
consideration for other social sciences and humanities (SSH). Recent research
(Angrist et al., 2020) challenges this perception of economics: the perception
would be historically inaccurate and especially at odds with the recent
interdisciplinarity of economics. By systematically studying citation patterns
since the 1950s in thousands of journals, we offer the best established
conclusions to date on this issue. Our results do show that the discipline is
uniquely insular from a historical point of view. But we also document an
important turn after the 1990s that drastically transformed the discipline as
it became more open, very quickly, to the influence of management,
environmental sciences and to a lesser degree, a variety of the SSH. While
this turn made economics less uniquely insular, as of today economics remains
the least outward-looking discipline with management among all SSH.
Furthermore, unlike in the other major social sciences, the most influential
journals in economics have not significantly contributed to the recent
increase in the interdisciplinarity of the discipline. While economics is
changing, it is too soon to claim that it has completed an interdisciplinary
turn. |