My small world

Harry Clarke reviews an article published in the latest Journal of Political Economy of the small world of academic economists. It seems that most economists have few co-authors who themselves do not co-author with one another. Thus, links are characterised by a large interconnection of star graph formations.

Naturally, this sort of thing prompts one to look at their own 'networked' situation. I looked at my academic publications (not including textbooks or working papers). To date (since my first publication in 1990) I have 88 published works or which 67% are co-authored. There are 25 distinct co-authors of whom only 3 pairs have co-authored with each other outside of a collaboration with me. Out of interest my main co-authors are Stephen King (29), Philip Williams (7), Scott Stern (6), Catherine de Fontenay (5) with the rest only 1 or 2 papers.

For other economists, 40.9% of papers are co-authored with 1.67 different co-authors. For the top 100 economists, 84.8% are co-authored with an average of 25.31 co-authors. So relative to that group I have less co-authored work for about the same number of co-authors.