The Fragmentation of the Mainstream and Communication in Economics: A View from the Top

Abstract

The decline of Neoclassical dominance has paved the way to a more fragmented Mainstream. In this article, we empirically explore the Mainstream’s thematic structure and its fragmentation’s effects on within-discipline communication. For this purpose, we exploit a dataset containing 10,064 articles published in economics in seven Blue Ribbon Eight journals between 1985 and 2006 and their citations. Articles are assigned to 18 topics created via Latent Dirichlet Allocation to represent specialities within economics. Results show that the economic Mainstream has yet to experience a dramatic increase in fragmentation in the observed period, and the prevailing topics are related to market equilibrium and econometrics. Moreover, the Mainstream’s thematic structure does not include any heterodox approach. Regarding communication, economists increasingly tap into diverse sources of information, and such diversity positively impacts the citational patterns of articles. The same result holds for the articles written by Nobel Prize winners and the most cited articles in the discipline, which exhibit a higher diversity than the whole sample.