Arbitration Literature

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the arbitration literature. Arbitration literature has a long history. So far, however, no attempt has been made to examine it and its evolution systematically and with a quantitative approach. The lack of investigation of this research question is, in and by itself, surprising. Clearly, the literature plays a strong role in shaping the thinking and making of international arbitration law. Moreover, literature—and scientific literature in particular—is a privileged conduit for the various actors in the social field of international arbitration. The chapter then looks at scientometrics. This field was first defined as ‘the quantitative methods of the research on the development of science as an informational process’. On the scientometrics market, the citation is the main currency. The rationale is that citation counts are positively associated with subsequent impact. Thus, arbitration literature can be measured in two ways. First, one determines which works are the most cited, in absolute terms and over time, for two different time windows. These are the works that likely have had the most impact on the knowledge in and about arbitration, where this knowledge is taken as a single, common whole. Second, one looks at what the co-citation network can reveal about the make-up of the world of arbitration literature.