The Scientometric Evaluation of 100 Developing Countries in the Field of Economics From 2007 to 2016

Abstract

This paper presents a scientometric evaluation of 17,737 articles published by economics journals indexed by SSCI with either principal or co-authors working in 100 developing countries’ institutions over the period 2007–2016, and provides helpful insights into the main trends and characteristics of developing countries in the field of economics in many aspects including annual number and share, distribution of countries, distribution of institutions, distribution of quartile, citation analysis etc. The quartile distribution of publications published by developing countries is Q1 (28.5%), Q2 (28.0%), Q3 (25.5%) and Q4 (18.0%). The number of articles published in Q4 is only 3,187, far less than 5049 of Q1. This paper also provides valuable information about the most publishing journals and the most frequently cited journals, as well as the most frequently cited reference. A co-word analysis based on the keywords and thematic noun-phrases in the titles and abstracts of the sample articles was used to explore the hot research topics in developing countries (e.g. economic growth, monetary policy, foreign direct investment, rural area, social welfare, stock return, international trade and financial crisis etc.). In addition, this paper also compares the similarities and differences of research topics between the articles published by developing countries and top five economics journals.