A bibliometric account of Chinese economics research through the lens of the China Economic Review

Very few studies on the assessment and evolution of Chinese economics research draw on quantitative methods, namely bibliometrics. Bibliometrics is a powerful tool that helps to explore, organize and analyze large amounts of information in a quantitative manner. Selecting the most important economic journal focusing on the Chinese economy – the China Economic Review (CER) – we classified and assessed all the (512) articles that have been published in CER from its founding (1989) to December 2010. Based on these articles, and undertaking an exploratory statistical analysis on three databases – a ‘bibliographic’ database (512 articles), a ‘roots’ database (over 10 thousand citations), and an ‘influence’ database (over 3 thousand citations), we concluded that: 1) ‘Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth’; ‘Economic Systems’, and ‘International economics’ are the most important topics for Chinese economics literature; 2) there is a trend in Chinese economics research for growing ‘rigor’, associated to a noticeable rise in the weight of formal/mathematical-based articles; 3) the ‘International economics’ topic does not influence nor is it influenced by Chinese economics literature; and 4) Chinese economics literature is characterized by a certain level of endogamy, given that its range of influence is rather concentrated (geographically) in China and the USA.