Global dynamics and country-level development in academic economics: An explorative cognitive-bibliometric study

The structure of academic economics has received a fair amount of attention within and beyond the
discipline. Less focus has been given the interdependencies of country and global dynamics.
Building and advancing this tradition, this explorative study examines geographic variation and
country specific developments in research practices in academic economics. More specifically I
investigate the interdependencies of global dynamics with country-level developments in the US,
Germany, UK, France, Switzerland and Austria. To that purpose the study investigates a
large-scale data set using inequality measures and social network analysis. The dataset analysed
in this study comprises 453,863 articles published in 477 journals citing each other a total of
3,807,289 times. This exploratory study confirms the high level of concentration and finds similar
trends on the country level. Further, an international convergence in the discipline can be
observed, possibly limiting the place-specific relevance of knowledge created in academic
economics.