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The Structure of Scholarly Publishing: a Case of Economics Research in India

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Abstract

There is a great deal of disparity in the creation and dissemination of scholarly publications across disciplines. The main objective of the study in this article is three-fold: first, to find empirical evidence of publishing regularity in economics journals in India; second, to examine what accounts for author concentration in journals, with a special focus on economics; and third, to understand the nature of scholarly collaboration. For this, authorship data from eight Indian economics journals and the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), a prestigious periodical encompassing a range of areas in social sciences, were manually obtained. This study contributes to existing literature by substantiating that author concentration is not merely an outcome of the degree of journal specialization. Interestingly, the study shows that a journal with generic readership is likely to form a power-law distribution. The computed measures of social network analysis indicate that collaboration in Indian economics, unlike in world economics, is in a nascent stage, consisting of a large number of isolated authors on the one hand, and some fragmented groups of varied sizes, on the other.

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Fig. 1

Source: data compiled by the author from EPW. Note: Fig. 1 is drawn using VOSviewer

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Notes

  1. The government of India established the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) in 1968 to support social science research in India.

  2. All the authors were given equal weight in case of co-authorship.

  3. This criterion applies to all journals except the Indian Journal of Economics. Authorship data compiled from the Indian Journal of Economics starts from 1962.

  4. In this paper, the chi-square goodness of fit test is used to test the presence or absence of Lotka’s law. If the observed value is less than the critical value, the null hypothesis is accepted; otherwise, it is rejected. Acceptance of null hypothesis means the presence of Lotka’s law. Coile (1978) recommends application of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (generally known as “K-S test”) statistic.

  5. See, Trivedi (1993) on publication lag, Hamermesh (1994) on time for refereeing, and Gans and Shepherd (1994) on degree of rejection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Finance, Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Vidya Vihar, Pilani, Rajasthan, 333031, India

    Krishna Muniyoor

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  1. Krishna Muniyoor
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Correspondence to Krishna Muniyoor.

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Appendices

Appendix 1. Pattern of Scientific Productivity in Major Disciplines: an Overview

Study

Period

Subject field

No. of authors

Key findings

Leavens (1953)*

1933–1952

Econometrics

721

Presence of Lotka’s lawa

Murphy (1973)

1959–1968

Humanities

170

Presence of Lotka’s law

Voos (1974)

1966–1970

Information Science

11,005

Absence of Lotka’s law

Schorr (1975)

1921–1973

Map librarianship

326

Presence of Lotka’s law

Radhakrishnan and Kernizan (1979)*

1968–1972

Computer Science

––

Absence of Lotka’s law

Chung & Cox (1990)

Inaugural to 1986

Financial Economics

6,270

Presence of Lotka’s law

Cox & Chung (1991)

1963–1988

Economics

13,576

Presence of Lotka’s law

Kawamura et al. (2009)

1971–1995

Dental Science

43,796

Presence of Lotka’s law

Talukdar (2011)

1982–2009

Business

4030

Absence of Lotka’s law

Corbet et al. (2019)

1990–2017

Economics

2521

Presence of Lotka’s law

Ahmi et al. (2020)

Until April 2020

XBRL

648

Presence of Lotka’s law

  1. Compiled by author from their respective studies; *compiled from Gray Potter (1981)
  2. aThe presence of Lotka’s law was confirmed by Potter (1981)

Appendix 2. Share of Top Three Institutional Contributors to Indian Economics Journals, 2005

Journals and period

Rank 1

Rank 2

Rank 3

Total

Institution (%)

Institution (%)

Institution (%)

(%)

IER (1966–2005)

Delhi School of Economics (12.1)

Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi (6.4)

Institute of Economic Growth (6.0)

24.5

IEJ (1978–05)

University of Bombay (6.2)

University of Delhi (2.0)

Delhi School of Economics (1.7)

9.8

JQE (1986–2005)

Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (5.5)

Reserve Bank of India (3.9)

Institute of Economic Growth (3.1)

12.5

IJAE (1964–2005)

Punjab Agricultural University (7.7)

Indian Agricultural Research Institute (5.1)

IIM, Ahmadabad (3.3)

16.1

IESHR (1985–2005)

University of Delhi (10.5)

Delhi School of Economics (6.1)

Jawaharlal Nehru University (3.2)

19.7

  1. Tabulated from data compiled by the author

Appendix 3. Some Papers Rejected by Leading Economics Journals and Journals that Published them

Author

Title of paper

Rejecting journal

Publishing journal

Akerlof, George

The Market for “Lemons”: Quality, Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism

American Economic Review

Journal of Political Economy

Review of Economic Studies

Quarterly Journal of Economics (1970)

Arthur, W. Brian

Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-In by Historical Events

American Economic Review

Quarterly Journal of Economics

American Economic Review

Economic Journal

Economic Journal (1989)

Becker, Gary S.,

Competition and Democracy

Journal of Political Economy

Journal of Law and Economics (1958)

Bhagwati, Jagadish

Immiserizing Growth: A Geometrical Note

Quarterly Journal of Economics

Review of Economic Studies (1958)

Buchanan, James M

External and Internal Public Debt

Quarterly Journal of Economics

American Economic Review (1957)

Friedman, Milton

Professor Pigou's Method for Measuring Elasticities of Demand from Budgetary Data

Economic Journal

Quarterly Journal of Economics (1935)

Harrod, Roy

The Law of Decreasing Costs

Economic Journal

Economic Journal (1931)

Krugman, Paul R.,

Increasing Returns, Monopolistic Competition, and International Trade

Quarterly Journal of Economics

Journal of International Economics

Modigliani, Franco

Fluctuations in the Savings-Income Ratio: A Problem in Economic Forecasting

Econometrica

Studies of Income and Wealth (1949)

Stolper, Wolfgang, and Samuelson, Paul A

Protection and Real Wages

American Economic Review

Review of Economic Studies (1941)

  1. Gans and Shepherd (1994)

Appendix 4. Descriptive Statistics of Collaboration Networks: a Comparison

Network properties

EPW

Goyal et al. (2006)

Authors in collaboration networks

1840

56,639

Size of the giant component

225

33,027

Average degree

1.92

1.672

Average distance

8.57

2.303

Clustering coefficient (overall)

0.69

0.157

  1. Data compiled by the author from EPW and Goyal et al. (2006)

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Muniyoor, K. The Structure of Scholarly Publishing: a Case of Economics Research in India. J Knowl Econ 13, 1801–1818 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-021-00797-8

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