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A Quantitative History of the Journal of Economc History and the Cliometric Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Robert Whaples
Robert Whaples
Affiliation:
The author is Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI 53201
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Abstract

What do economic historians do? I analyze quantitatively The Journal of Economic History's contents since its founding, showing subfields, nations, and periods studied, and which scholars and universities have contributed. The timing, extent, and participants of the cliometric revolution are investigated. New rankings of economic history programs are made.

Type
Papers Presented at the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 289 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1991

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References

I thank Arthur Diamond for comments and help in allowing me to replicate his work, and I thank my colleagues Michael Dintenfass and Margo Anderson for their comments. This article celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Economic History Association and acknowledges my debt to it. It is dedicated to the late C. Francis Willey, whose collection of economic history journals now graces my office, and to Carol Petraitis and Claudia Goldin, who made working as a graduate assistant for this Journal both educational and enjoyable. Some of this research was carried out for the Committee on Historical Statistics of the Economic History Association. I thank William Becker for sending me an updated EHA mailing list.Google Scholar

1 This table supercedes the results reported in the Editors' Notes, this Journal, 46 (Mar. 1986), pp. 232–34. In table I of the Editors' Notes, I measured the shares of fields in this Journal from 1941 to 1985, using percent of the articles in each field, rather than the percent of pages, a better measure which is used here. In addition, the classifications reported here are more precise than those in the earlier work.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Diamond, Arthur M. Jr and Haurin, Donald R., “Changing Patterns of Subfield Specialization among Cohorts of Economists from 1927–1980” (Unpublished manuscript, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1990).Google Scholar

3 Diamond, Arthur M. Jr, “Age and the Acceptance of Cliometrics,” this Journal, 40 (12 1980), pp. 838–41.Google Scholar

4 Using year of Ph.D. yields similar results.Google Scholar

5 The pages in co-authored articles were weighted by the sex of the authors. Thus, two-thirds of the pages of an article with one male and two female authors were counted as female-authored pages. The trends reported are based on a five-year moving average.Google Scholar

6 See Fogel, Robert and Elton, G. R., Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (New Haven, 1983).Google Scholar

7 The 22 authors with 100 or more pages are Jeffrey Williamson (290 pages), Arthur Cole (195), Paul David (181), Peter Temin (174), W. W. Rostow (172), Donald Adams (160), Stefano Fenoaltea (149), Lance Davis (149), Lawrence Officer (145), Rober Fogel (133), David Landes (130), Kozo Yamamura (130), Douglass North (127), C. Knick Harley (127), Winifred Rothenberg (125), Stanley Lebergott (125), Carter Goodrich (117), Frederic Lane (112), Herbert Heaton (110), Harry Scheiber (110), Joel Mokyr (107), Alan Olmstead (101), and Stanley Engerman (100).Google Scholar

8 The 20 universities whose faculties have contributed the most pages to this Journal are Harvard (1,298 pages), Yale (738), Chicago (679), Michigan (604), Columbia (602), Wisconsin (547), Washington (541), UC-Berkeley (523), Stanford (496), Toronto (478), Pennsylvania (463), Rutgers (452), Johns Hopkins (440), MIT (370), Northwestern (339), Cornell (319), Minnesota (296), Illinois (285), UCLA (278), and Princeton (261).Google Scholar

9 Niemi, Albert, “Journal Publication Performance of Economic History Programs: 1960–1969 and 1970–1974,” this Journal, 35 (09 1975), pp. 635–41. More recent rankings of economic history departments are less reliable. Recent studies ranking economics departments generally employ journal-quality weights, based on citations to articles published in each journal.Google Scholar Most commonly used are those derived in Liebowitz, S. J. and Palmer, J. P., “Assessing the Relative Impacts of Economics Journals,” Journal of Economic Literature, 22 (03 1984), pp. 77–87.Google Scholar Unfortunately, these rankings are not realistic. They imply that a size-adjusted page published in the Journal of Political Economy is of equal value to nearly 100 pages published in this JOURNAL or Explorations in Economic History, and nearly 1,000 pages in the Economic History Review. These journal-quality ratings of economic history programs are dominated by a handful of articles published in the leading mainstream economics journals. See, for example, Tschirhart, John, “Ranking Economics Departments in Areas of Expertise,“ Journal of Economic Education, 20 (Spring 1989), pp. 199–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Tschirhart compared departments as of 1985 and surveyed articles published between 1975 and 1984, inclusive. The Liebowitz-Palmer rankings are also used in Tremblay, Carol, Tremblay, Victor, and Lee, Byunglak, “Field Publishing Performance of U.S. Economics Departments,” Atlantic Economic Journal, 18 (06 1990), pp. 37–48,CrossRefGoogle Scholar whose rankings cover output from 1980 to 1986. In addition, hey included only journals ranked in the top forty by Liebowitz and Palmer. None of the economic history journals rank this high, so articles published in them are not considered. Perhaps a better system of ranking journals was developed in Hawkins, Robert, Ritter, Lawrence, and Walter, Ingo, “What Economists Think of Their Journals,” Journal of Political Economy, 81 (07 1973), pp. 1017–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Their respondents rank this JOURNAL sixteenth among economics journals. The other economic history journals are not among the 87 journals ranked.

10 Page sizes have been standardized. During the 1980s, for every 100 characters on a page in this Journal, there were 100 characters per page in Explorations, and 110 in the Economic History Review.Google Scholar

11 Current affiliation was taken from the Economic History Association mailing list. I contacted several departments to verify the current affiliations of some individuals. An appendix is available from the author.Google Scholar

12 The table gives Niemi's variant one, which weights the journals equally. My rankings differ from Niemi's in three ways. They include Canadian universities, exclude pages from the Business History Review, and exclude economic historians not affiliated with economics departments, such as those in business, finance, or industrial relations departments. If these economic historians are included, Harvard extends its lead, UC-Davis ranks second, Pennsylvania climbs one position, and Indiana ties Ohio University. I have excluded pages from the Business History Review because business history has become a separate field from economic history and because its inclusion would necessitate the inclusion of other specialized economic history journals, such as Labor History and Agricultural History.Google Scholar