One hundred twenty-five years of the Journal of Political Economy: A bibliometric overview Lluis Amiguet1, Anna M. Gil-Lafuente2, Finn E. Kydland3, José M. Merigó4 1Department of Communication, Rovira i Virgili University, Av. Catalunya 35, 43002 Tarragona, Spain 2Department of Business Administration, University of Barcelona, Av. Diagonal 690, 08034 Barcelona, Spain 3Department of Economics, University of California – Santa Barbara, 2127 North Hall, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA 4Department of Management Control and Information Systems, School of Economics and Business, University of Chile, Av. Diagonal Paraguay 257, 8330015 Santiago, Chile Emails: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Abstract The Journal of Political Economy was created in December 1892. In 2017, the journal celebrates the 125th anniversary. Motivated by this event, this study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading trends of the journal according to a wide range of criteria including authors, institutions, countries, papers and keywords. The work uses the Scopus and the Web of Science databases to collect the bibliographic material and considers a wide range of bibliometric indicators including the number of citations and publications, the h-index, citation thresholds and the cites per paper. The study also uses software for the visualization of similarities by using several bibliometric techniques including bibliographic coupling, co-citation and co-occurrence of keywords. The results indicates that research published in the journal is mainly carried out by US economists, being the University of Chicago the most productive and influential institution. Several authors that published their seminal work in the journal have obtained the Nobel Prize in economics. The journal is well-recognized in the scientific community as one of the Top 5 journals in economics. 1 1. Introduction The Journal of Political Economy (JPE) is one of the leading journals in economics and was launched in 1892. J. Laurence Laughlin, founder and chairman of the Department of Political Economy (later Department of Economics) at the University of Chicago, was the first editor of the journal (Longawa, 1992). After Laughlin, many other economists became editors of JPE including several Nobel Prize winners such as Robert Mundell, George J. Stigler, Robert Lucas Jr, James J. Heckman and Gary S. Becker (Longawa, 1992). JPE started as a quarterly journal until 1906 when it started publishing 10 issues per year. In 1922, the journal became bimonthly and continues today to do so. Note that in some exceptional years, the journal published less issues (1944 and 1945) and in some other years it also published some additional supplements. In 2017, JPE becomes 125 years old. In order to celebrate this anniversary, this study develops a bibliometric analysis of the publications of JPE. The objective is to identify the leading trends occurring in the journal by identifying the most productive and influential authors, institutions and countries. Additionally, the work also identifies the most influential papers, keywords and journals in JPE. The analysis employs several bibliometric indicators and techniques by using the Web of Science database and a software for building graphical maps. Bibliometrics is a research field of library and information science (Bar-Ilan, 2008) that studies the bibliographic material with quantitative methods (Broadus, 1987; Pritchard, 1969). It is very useful for classifying academic research providing general overviews of a specific issue like a research field, a journal or a country (Bonilla et al. 2015). From this point of view, bibliometrics is considered a useful tool for predicting future Nobel Prize winners (Björk et al. 2014). In the literature, there are many bibliometric studies in a wide range of areas including management (Podsakoff et al. 2008), entrepreneurship (Landström et al. 2012), innovation (Fagerberg et al. 2012), operations research and management science (Merigó and Yang 2017), finance (Borokhovich et al. 1995a) and operations management (Pilkington and Meredith, 2009). In economics, there are also many bibliometric works. For example, Coupé (2003) and García-Castrillo et al. (2002) present a worldwide overview of production in economics. Kocher and Sutter (2001) analyse the institutional concentration of authors in 2 top journals in economics. Kim et al. (2006) analyse the most cited papers in economics since the seventies. Davis and Papanek (1984) and Dusansky and Vernon (1998) develop a ranking of US economics departments. Lubrano et al. (2003) present a similar approach for economics departments in Europe. Stigler and Friedland (1975) study the citation practices of doctorates in economics. Many other authors have focused on ranking economics journals in order to identify the most prominent outlets and how they are evolving through time (Stigler et al. 1995). Hawkins et al. (1973) develop a ranking of economics journals with a survey among 111 economists and Axarloglou and Theoharakis (2003) with 2103 researchers. Liebowitz and Palmer (1984) produce a ranking based on citations in the second half of the twentieth century and up to the eighties. Laband and Piette (1994), provide an updated ranking based on the latest changes occurring over the last years. Hudson (2013) considers several lists of economics journals and identifies how these rankings where favouring one type of journal or another one. Stern (2013) studies the rankings by the Journal Citation Reports of 2011 and how these results can be considered robust or instead they generate uncertainties between journals in similar positions. Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004) present a journal ranking based on new methods for measuring intellectual influence (Perry and Reny, 2016). Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003) also develop a ranking of economics journals but additionally build a ranking of institutions in economics. Laband (2013) builds a ranking of economics journals based on the total citations received and other related indicators. Card and Dellavigna (2013) analysed the Top 5 journals in economics and how publishing in them has changed since the 1970 (Ellison, 2002). Particularly, it is worth mentioning the significant decrease in the acceptance rate over time and the increase on the number of publications of the American Economic Review. Other studies focus on a specific area of economics. For example, Wagstaff and Culyer (2012) develop a bibliometric overview of health economics. Hoepner et al. (2012) present a bibliometric analysis of environmental and ecological economics. Hall (1990) and Baltagi (2007) provide some worldwide rankings in econometrics research. Some other works put their attention on a specific country or region. For example, Kalaitzidakis et al. (1999) analyses the publications of European institutions in the core journals and Bonilla et al. (2015) present a country analysis of economics research in Latin America. Neri and 3 Rodgers (2015) analyse the publications of Australian institutions while Davies et al. (2008) focus on Canadian research. Yu and Gao (2010) provides a ranking for Chinese institutions and Rodríguez (2006) for Spanish academics. When a journal celebrates a special anniversary, it is very common to publish some documents related to the anniversary such as an editorial (Christ, 1983; Hart and Mizon, 1983; Van Fleet et al. 2006) or a review (Kozlowski et al. 2017). Sometimes, some journals organize a special issue to celebrate the anniversary. For example, the American Economic Review published a Centenary Special Issue in order to celebrate the 100th anniversary in 2011 (Arrow et al. 2011; Margo, 2011). This special issue included many classic papers and a committee of leading economists constituted by Kenneth J. Arrow, B. Douglas Bernheim, Martin S. Feldstein, Daniel McFadden, James M. Poterba, and Robert M. Solow, made a selection of the Top 20 articles that were published in the American Economic Review during the first one hundred years (Arrow et al. 2011). The American Political Science Review (Sigelman, 2006a) also published a Centennial Issue. This issue published several retrospective papers including an historical overview (Gunnell, 2006) and the most cited papers of the journal (Sigelman, 2006b). The Economic Journal published a special issue in order to celebrate the 125th anniversary (Cripps et al. 2015). The Journal of Political Economy also published a Centennial Issue in 1992 with several remarkable papers including a short editorial analysing some key issues of the history of the journal (Longawa, 1992). But still there is no bibliometric study of the publications of JPE. Therefore, the aim of this work is to solve this problem providing a general bibliometric overview of the journal identifying the leading publication and citation trends that have occurred in JPE. Note that there are many other journals that have already published a bibliometric overview, or a related retrospective approach, of their publications. For example, Heck et al. (1986) study the leading authors and institutions of the Journal of Finance between 1946 and 1985. Heck and Bremser (1986) develop a similar approach for the first sixty years of The Accounting Review. Schwert (1993) presents a retrospective evaluation of the Journal of Financial Economics between 1974 and 1991 identifying the leading authors, institutions and papers of the journal. Inkpen and Beamish (1994) analyze the first twenty-five years