Who writes economics?
An authorship and citation portrait of the NBER working-paper series.
Authorship is concentrated
The most prolific 207 authors (the stored top-1% group) hold 17.9% of author credits. 11,216 authors appear on one paper (54.1% of author IDs).
Authorship data cover 35,892 of the 35,897 indexed papers. The difference of 5 papers is a coverage gap; it is not silently counted as zero authorship. Author credits count each author-paper association, so they exceed the paper count.
Teams have grown
Mean authors per paper, by decade. Bar scale: zero to four authors. The 2020s are incomplete.
| Decade | Papers | Solo papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1970s | 396 | 61.6% |
| 1980s | 2,822 | 51.6% |
| 1990s | 4,213 | 32.3% |
| 2000s | 8,194 | 23.0% |
| 2010s | 10,970 | 13.4% |
| 2020s | 9,297 | 8.6% |
The citation graph is a slice of the record
OpenAlex reference lists are present for 26,559 papers. Of 1,201,306 recorded references, 104,417 (8.7%) link to another NBER paper. Among those within-series links, 18.9% share an author.
This is not an all-literature self-citation rate. Journal versions, unindexed references and papers outside NBER are not captured by that denominator. Self-citation alone does not establish inappropriate behavior.
Sources and reproducibility
These figures are taken from the checked-in public NBER report, not a fresh download. People use NBER author IDs; institutions in the underlying pipeline use ROR IDs. Citation counts refer to working-paper versions.
Aggregate snapshot (JSON) · Team-size data (CSV) · Author rankings (CSV) · Read the full bibliometrics tables
Source systems: NBER paper metadata and OpenAlex. Regenerate these pages with python3 workspace/tools/build_research_index.py.