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The evolution of conceptual diversity in economics titles from 1890 to 2012

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Abstract

Using bibliometric techniques, this work investigates the evolution of titles in economics research. It attempts to present a complete and accurate picture of systematic changes in the average character number, syllable number, word number and conceptual diversity in the titles over a long period of time. Based on a total of 338,866 academic paper titles in economics published between 1890 and 2012 from the EconLit and the Web of Knowledge, the economics titles were analyzed from the perspectives of social network, computational phonetics and conceptual diversity. The results showed that in the evolution of this discipline, authors were using increasingly more words for their paper titles and the conceptual diversity in paper titles underwent interesting periodic fluctuations over more than 100 years. The 1970s was a decade that achieved special prominence in conceptual diversity and relational complexity of titles.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Languages, Qianjiang College, Hangzhou Normal University, Zhejiang, 310018, China

    Shesen Guo, Ganzhou Zhang, Qiuhong Ju, Yu Chen, Qianfeng Chen & Lulu Li

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  1. Shesen Guo
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  2. Ganzhou Zhang
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  3. Qiuhong Ju
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  4. Yu Chen
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  5. Qianfeng Chen
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  6. Lulu Li
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Correspondence to Shesen Guo.

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Guo, S., Zhang, G., Ju, Q. et al. The evolution of conceptual diversity in economics titles from 1890 to 2012. Scientometrics 102, 2073–2088 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1501-6

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