Exploring the Shape of Economics: A Multilayer Network Analysis of Social Communities and Intellectual Similarity Among Journals Before and After the 2008 Financial Crisis

TL;DR

This study uses a multilayer network approach to analyze the evolution of economics journals' social and intellectual relationships before and after the 2008 crisis, revealing stability in core structures and the influence of editorial networks.

Contribution

It introduces a multilayer network methodology combining social and intellectual links to study discipline evolution, highlighting the dominant role of editorial networks.

Findings

Structural continuity in journal relationships across periods

Research topics shifted post-crisis, but core relationships remained stable

Editorial networks significantly influence discipline hierarchies

Abstract

This paper develops a multilayer network approach for exploring the evolution of scientific disciplines, using the case of economics before and after the 2008 global financial crisis as a large-scale empirical testing ground. The units of analysis are journals, linked by social and intellectual relationships. The analysis covers all journals indexed in EconLit across three years (2006, 2012 and 2019). In the most recent year (2019), the dataset includes 909 journals, over 30,000 editorial board members, more than 260,000 authors, 134,000 articles, and nearly 2 million cited references. For each period, we model journals as connected in a four-layer multiplex network: the social relationships are based on shared editors (interlocking editorship) and shared authors (interlocking authorship), while the intellectual ones are based on shared references (bibliographic coupling) and textual similarity between articles. These four layers are integrated using Similarity Network Fusion to produce unified similarity networks from which journal communities are identified. Comparing the field across the three periods reveals a high degree of structural continuity. Although research topics changed after the crisis, the fundamental social and intellectual relationships among journals remained remarkably stable. A major result of the analysis is that editorial networks play the dominant role in shaping hierarchies and legitimize knowledge production within the discipline. Whether this finding holds in other scientific disciplines remains an open question for future research.