Project data

Funding entiy: Italian Ministry of University and Research

Call: PRIN 2017

Coordinator: UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI SIENA

UNISI Principal Investigator: Alberto Baccini

Department: Economics and statistics

Start date: 18 March 2020 – End date: 18 Septembre 2023

 

Description

Has economics finally become an immature science?

Mapping economics at an epoch of fragmentation, by combining historical perspectives and new quantitative approaches

Economics appears to tend towards a state of “immaturity”, to borrow from Kuhn: its once monolithic mainstream consists of a plurality of research programmes often deviating from the neoclassical core. By integrating quantitative techniques and qualitative analysis, this project aims to provide the set of science “maps” of economics required to navigate a fragmented discipline in historical perspective:

1) “History of economic thought” maps, focusing, in an intellectual history perspective, on relations between communities of scholars and their research programmes;

2) “Interlocking editorships” maps, describing through network analysis the crossed presence of scholars on the editorial boards of academic journals (new database 1926-2016);

3) “Gatekeepers of economics” maps, emphasizing the academic-power dimension of ties between economics journals;

4) “Topic-modeling” maps, decoding the latent structure of economics through text-mining techniques applied to the full text of economic articles included in the JSTOR database.

Aimed to produce and facilitate further knowledge development about the evolution of the discipline, this mapping exercise is expected to give life to an interactive open-science platform and possibly innovative teaching and learning resources.

 

This project has received funding from Ministry of University and Research (MUR) – PRIN 2017