Abstract
Environmental and Resource Economics is one of the premier journals in the field of environmental economics. It was established with an aspiration to focus more on applied and policy relevant research compared to other established journals, and to establish better channels of communication and collaboration between researchers from Europe and other parts of the world. We present a text based exploratory analysis of 1630 articles published in the Journal from 1991 to 2015 that suggests the Journal has been somewhat successful in meeting both these aims. Perhaps more importantly, it shows the Journal continues to progress toward these goals. The European authors are the largest contributors to the Journal, which is in contrast to other prominent journals (such as Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Ecological Economics). And while most of the collaboration has occurred within this geographic region (e.g., European authors collaborated with other European authors more frequently), this trend appears to be changing as the proportion of articles written by international collaborators is gradually increasing. Topic analysis reveals that almost all of the articles could be grouped under applied and/or policy relevant topics, and almost two-thirds of the articles are empirical in nature, which suggest that the journal has been able to fulfil both of its commitments. We also investigate trends in research foci over the last 25 years and what kind of research gaps can be discerned.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted with the support of funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions. We acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions of Ms Tammie Harold and Mr Tas Thamo of UWA.
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Polyakov, M., Chalak, M., Iftekhar, M.S. et al. Authorship, Collaboration, Topics, and Research Gaps in Environmental and Resource Economics 1991–2015. Environ Resource Econ 71, 217–239 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0147-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0147-2
Keywords
- Topic analysis
- Latent Dirichlet allocation
- Co-authorship
- Environmental and resource economics
JEL Classification
- A11
- A14
- Q0