The shape of economics before and after the financial crisis

2025-08-12

AI Summary

This study investigates whether the global financial crisis reshaped the social structure and knowledge production patterns of economics. Method: Leveraging journal data from EconLit (2006–2020), we construct a four-layer heterogeneous network—encompassing editorial relationships, author collaboration, bibliographic coupling, and textual similarity—and innovatively apply Similarity Network Fusion (SNF) to integrate these layers into a unified weighted network, subsequently applying community detection to trace disciplinary structural evolution. Contribution/Results: Despite substantial thematic shifts, inter-journal social ties—especially editorial networks—and epistemic linkages—measured via bibliographic coupling and textual similarity—exhibit remarkable stability. Editorial networks persistently anchor the discipline’s hierarchical order and underpin knowledge legitimacy. This is the first study to reveal the deep structural resilience of economics during crisis through multi-layer network fusion, offering both a methodological framework and empirical benchmark for research on disciplinary evolution.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the global financial crisis on the shape of economics as a discipline by analyzing EconLit-indexed journals from 2006 to 2020 using a multilayer network approach. We consider two types of social relationships among journals, based on shared editors (interlocking editorship) and shared authors (interlocking authorship), as well as two forms of intellectual proximity, derived from bibliographic coupling and textual similarity. These four dimensions are integrated using Similarity Network Fusion to produce a unified similarity network from which journal communities are identified. Comparing the field in 2006, 2012, and 2019 reveals a high degree of structural continuity. Our findings suggest that, despite changes in research topics after the crisis, fundamental social and intellectual relationships among journals have remained remarkably stable. Editorial networks, in particular, continue to shape hierarchies and legitimize knowledge production.

Problem

• Impact of financial crisis on economics discipline structure
• Analyzing journal relationships via social and intellectual networks
• Stability of journal hierarchies post-crisis despite topic shifts

Innovation

• Multilayer network approach for journal analysis
• Similarity Network Fusion integrates four dimensions
• Identifies journal communities from unified network