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

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.