TREND OF SUBJECTS PUBLISHED IN ECONOMICS JOURNALS 1969–2007

I. INTRODUCTION A fundamental question for any academic discipline is, "What subjects are people researching?" This question can be asked in several ways. Which subjects are economists publishing? Which subjects are economists reading? Which subjects have the most impact on the literature? Which subjects are represented in well-respected general subject journals? How many specialty journals are dedicated to each subject? Answers to these questions are useful for strategic planning, publication strategy, and curriculum design through the identification of shifting focus within the economics discipline. For instance, the research record of an economist who publishes in a widely published subject field that is little published in leading general subject journals should be evaluated differently from an economist whose fields have the opposite properties. A liberal arts college that desires to make more of an impact on the literature may find that the subjects that need to be taught at the undergraduate level are in conflict with the subjects that are being published in top journals. A subject area with a small percentage of articles published that has had a strong impact when adjusted for citations may be fertile ground for research. Although the study of economic research has a long history, subject area focus has been little studied. Morin (1966) examined the sales of Chamberlin's Theory of Monopolistic Competition, Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development, Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, Friedman's Essays in Positive Economics, and Becket's Economics of Discrimination to examine the changes in economics from 1933 to 1964. Figuring that most copies of these books were being read by researchers, he posited that the changes in the sales of these books indicate shifts in interests within economics. Fusfeld (1956) examined the departments and types of institutions which were represented by papers at the 1950-1954 American Economic Association meetings. He did not rank these departments but viewed the narrow group of represented schools as a flaw in the program selection. Niemi (1975) created rankings of the top 100 economics departments and the top southern economics departments according to the number of publications and the number of pages published in a group of 24 journals. Smith and Gold (1976) adjusted Niemi for the number of faculty members in each department. Graves, Marchand, and Thompson (1982) built on the work by Niemi as well as Smith and Gold by updating their statistics and providing a trend analysis to examine rankings through time. Scott and Mitias (1996) provided updated rankings by pages published using two different sets of economics journals and created a list of the top 50 economists by pages published. Davis and Papanek (1984) first proposed using citations for ranking economics departments. Laband (1986) ranked departments based upon the productivity of the graduates of the program using both pages published and citations. Bodenhorn (1997) ranked liberal arts colleges by citations. Medoff (1989) ranked individual economists based upon citations and ranks schools based upon the number of "top" economists employed there. Although these analyses provide important insights into the productivity of economists and provide a benchmark for hiring and promotion to tenure, few have discussed the distribution of subject areas within journals. Harden, Liano, and Chan (2006) calculated the percentage of Real Estate Economics articles published. McCain (1991) used article subjects in her cocitation analysis. Durden and Ellis (1991) listed the most oft-cited articles in the AER broken down by subject area. Kim, Morse, and Zingales (2006) examined all the articles from 1970 to 2005 that received more than 500 citations. They used the EconLit database to identify the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) Codes associated with each article. …