Digital History of Macroeconomics
Creators: name: Goutsmedt, Aurélien
name: Truc, Alexandre
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025

description: Presentation of the Mapping Macroeconomics Project

Aurélien Goutsmedt and Alexandre Truc/ Last compiled on 2021-03-17

What is the Mapping Macroeconomics Project

The finished project: https://www.digitalhistoryofscience.org/dhm/

This project has received a grant from the History of Economics Sociey New Initiatives Fund.It is conducted by Aurélien Goutsmedt and Alexandre Truc.You can find a more in-depth presentation of the project here.

It takes as a point of departure that economics has been characterized since the 1970s by an exponential increase in the number of articles published in academic journals. This phenomenon makes it harder for historians of economics to properly assess the trends in the transformation of economics, the main topics researched, the most influential authors and ideas, *etc*. As a result, historians of this period run the risk of relying, at least as first pass, on a presentist view of the history of ideas: what today’s economists consider as important contributions from the past and the most influential authors. When historians shield themselves from the retrospective views of the practising economists, they have to delve into the literature of the past that has been forgotten for the most part and to scrutinize the network of authors that are little known. This effort allows historians to correct the potted histories of the practising economists and to propose alternative narratives of the evolution of the discipline. However, the bigger the literature to be studied is, the harder the historians’ capacity to grasp the overall picture of the time.

We agree with those who consider that developing collective quantitative tools could help historians to confront this challenge. The issues and uses of quantitative tools in history of economics have been the topic of many discussions in our field—see for instance Backhouse (1998), Claveau and Gingras (2016) and the Journal of Economic Methodology special issue in 2018, in particular Edwards, Giraud, and Schinckus (2018) and Cherrier and Svorenčík (2018)—, but the technical barrier posed by the methods remains an obstacle for many historians. The challenges and opportunities that a quantitative history brings are particularly useful to the recent history of macroeconomics. Practising macroeconomists are eager to tell narratives of the evolution of their field that serve the purpose of intervening on current debates, by giving credit to particular authors and weight to specific ideas. Historians who go into this area find plenty of accounts by macroeconomists and have to handle the vast increase in the macroeconomic literature since the last quarter of the past century.

Our goal is to build an online interactive platform displaying bibliometric data on a large set of macroeconomic articles. We aim at settling the basis for a broad and long-run project on the history of macroeconomics, as well as to bring to historians tools to run quantitative inquiries to support their own research work.

Structure of the Github repository

You will find in this repository all the R scripts used to build our data and analyses.

1_Corpus_creation

You will find here all the scripts and documentation relative to the extraction of the JEL codes from Econlit and the matching with Web of Science database. It deals with generating the list of articles, references, authors, affiliations, etc. that will be used after.

2_Network_creation

This directory gathers all the scripts and documentation for the first step of the project:



Creating the list of networks and identifying communities

Naming these communities

Adding information about institutions


3_Analysis

This directory gathers the scripts to produce a report to analyze and understand our data

4_Platform_tables

This directory gathers the scripts to produce all the necessary data and tables that are used in the online platform.

5_Writing

Your will find here the documents to produce the technical documentation that is on the online platform.

References

Backhouse, Roger E. 1998. “The Transformation of U.S. Economics, 1920-1960, Viewed Through a Survey of Journal Articles.” History of Political Economy 30 (4): 85–107.

Cherrier, Beatrice, and Andrej Svorenčík. 2018. “The Quantitative Turn in the History of Economics: Promises, Perils and Challenges.” Journal of Economic Methodology 0 (0): 1–11.

Claveau, François, and Yves Gingras. 2016. “Macrodynamics of Economics: A Bibliometric History.” History of Political Economy 48 (4): 551–92.

Edwards, José, Yann Giraud, and Christophe Schinckus. 2018. “A Quantitative Turn in the Historiography of Economics?” Journal of Economic Methodology 25 (4): 283–90.