The paper visualises war and defence in economic history journals since 1989.

What is it about?

Economics usually takes for granted a peaceful world with peaceful market transactions, where war and conflict are anomalies to the current state of business life. However, as History shows violence is a pervasive phenomenon. How is the current state of the art of research on war and defence in economic history journals? This paper provides an overview of research published on this topic by a selection of economic history journals since the fall of Berlin wall. By means of bibliometric and cluster analysis, and using visualising analytical tools, we show the production, main topics, authors, sources, etc. on this research area, and compare with the treatment received in economic journals. The main findings are that publications in economic history journals have increased in the last decades; cover a list of themes broader than that in economic journals; give an increasing importance to quantitative techniques; cite sources from the same area as well as from the top economic journals; and show a relative lack of appeal to neighbouring disciplines. Although economics and economic history influence each other, the direction of the scientific knowledge is going mostly from economics towards economic history rather than the opposite.

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Photo by UX Gun on Unsplash

Photo by UX Gun on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It is an interesting bibliometric analysis.