Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-92wsb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-20T20:22:28.109Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Trends in the publication of experimental economics articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2025

Ernesto Reuben Open the ORCID record for Ernesto Reuben [Opens in a new window] ,
Sherry Xin Li ,
Sigrid Suetens ,
Andrej Svorenčík ,
Theodore Turocy  and
Vasileios Kotsidis
Ernesto Reuben*
Affiliation:
Social Science Division and Center for Behavioral Institutional Design, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Sherry Xin Li
Affiliation:
Social Science Division and Center for Behavioral Institutional Design, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Department of Economics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA
Sigrid Suetens
Affiliation:
Social Science Division and Center for Behavioral Institutional Design, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Department of Economics, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Andrej Svorenčík
Affiliation:
Social Science Division and Center for Behavioral Institutional Design, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Department of Economics, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
Theodore Turocy
Affiliation:
Social Science Division and Center for Behavioral Institutional Design, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates School of Economics and Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Vasileios Kotsidis
Affiliation:
Social Science Division and Center for Behavioral Institutional Design, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
*
e-mail: ereuben@nyu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We report data on the experimental articles published from 2000 to 2021 in seven leading general-interest economics journals. We also look at time trends in the characteristics of the published experimental articles, including citations and the nationality of the authors. We find an overall increasing trend in the publication of non-lab experiments in all journals. By contrast, the share of lab experiments has more than halved in the AER and remained low in other Top five journals. The diverging trends for non-lab and lab experiments are not universal as the shares of both have increased in two other high-ranking economics journals (JEEA and EJ). We also observe some heterogeneities in publication, citations, rankings, and locations of authors' affiliations across journals and types of experiments.

Keywords

Experimental economicsBibliometricsLab experimentsField experiments

JEL classification

C9: Design of Experiments

Information

Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 8 , Issue 1-2 , December 2022 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Economic Science Association 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

The replication material for the study is available at https://doi.org/10.3886/E173861V1.

References

Anauati, M. V., Galiani, S., Gálvez, R. H. (2020). Differences in citation patterns across journal tiers: The case of economics. Economic Inquiry, 58, 1217–1232. 10.1111/ecin.12867Google Scholar
Baghestanian, S., & Popov, S. V. (2014). Alma Mat(t)er(s): Determinants of early career success in economics. SSRN discussion paper 2506817.Google Scholar
Fréchette, G. R., Sarnoff, K., & Yariv, L. (2022). Experimental economics: Past and future. Annual Review of Economics (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Nikiforakis, N., Slonim, R. (2015). Editors Preface: Introducing JESA. Journal of the Economic Science Association, 1(1), 1–7. 10.1007/s40881-015-0012-4Google Scholar
Nikiforakis, N., Slonim, R. (2019). Editors' Preface: Trends in experimental economics (1975–2018). Journal of the Economic Science Association, 5(2), 143–148. 10.1007/s40881-019-00082-0Google Scholar
Svorenčík, A. (2016). The sidney siegel tradition: The divergence of behavioral and experimental economics at the end of the 1980s. History of Political Economy, 48(suppl 1), 270–294. 10.1215/00182702-3619310Google Scholar
Svorenčík, A. (2020). Rejecting rejections—The Reception of experimental economics. Oxford Economic Papers, 72(4), 946–965. 10.1093/oep/gpaa024Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Reuben et al. supplementary material

Reuben et al. supplementary material
Download Reuben et al. supplementary material(File)
File 215.3 KB