IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-02735838.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Classifying Economics: A History of the JEL Codes

Author

Listed:
  • Béatrice Cherrier

    (CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

In this paper, I suggest that the history of the classification system used by the American Economic Association (AEA) to list economic literature and scholars is a relevant proxy to understand the transformation of economics science throughout the twentieth century. Successive classifications were fashioned through heated discussions on the status of theoretical and empirical work, data and measurement, and proper objects of analysis. They also reflected the contradictory demands of users, including economists but also civil servants, journalists, publishers, librarians, and the military, and reflected rapidly changing institutional and technological constraints. Until the late 1940s, disagreements on the general structure of the classification dominated AEA discussions. As the subject matters, methods, and definition of economics rapidly evolved after the war, methodological debates raged on the status of theoretical and empirical work and the degree of unification of the discipline. It was therefore the ordering and content of major categories that was closely discussed during the 1956 revision. The 1966 revision, in contrast, was fueled by institutional and technical transformations rather than intellectual ones. Classifiers essentially reacted to changes in the way economists' work was evaluated, the nature and size of the literature they produced, the publishing industry, and the use of computer facilities. The final 1988-90 revision was an attempt by the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) editors to translate the mature core fields structure of their science into a set of codes and accommodate the new types of applied work economists identified themselves with. The 1990 classification system was only incrementally transformed in the next twenty years, but that the AEA is currently considering a new revision may signal more profound changes in the structure of economics.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Béatrice Cherrier, 2017. "Classifying Economics: A History of the JEL Codes," Post-Print halshs-02735838, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02735838
    DOI: 10.1257/jel.20151296
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yann Giraud & Pedro Duarte, 2016. "The Place of the History of Economic Thought in Mainstream Economics, 1991-2011, Viewed Through a Bibliographic Survey," Post-Print hal-02980171, HAL.
    2. Silva, Ester G. & Teixeira, Aurora A.C., 2008. "Surveying structural change: Seminal contributions and a bibliometric account," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 273-300, December.
    3. Robert A. Margo, 2011. "The Economic History of the American Economic Review : A Century's Explosion of Economics Research," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(1), pages 9-35, February.
    4. Szenberg, Michael, editor & Ramrattan, Lall, editor, 2014. "Secrets of Economics Editors," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262525461, April.
    5. Jefferson Pooley & Mark Solovey, 2010. "Marginal to the Revolution: The Curious Relationship between Economics and the Behavioral Sciences Movement in Mid-Twentieth-Century America," History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, vol. 42(5), pages 199-233, Supplemen.
    6. Peter L. Rousseau, 2013. "Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee: San Diego, CA, January 3, 2013," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(3), pages 692-700, May.
    7. Daniel S. Hamermesh, 2013. "Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing: Who and How?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(1), pages 162-172, March.
    8. Duarte, Pedro Garcia & Giraud, Yann, 2016. "The Place Of The History Of Economic Thought In Mainstream Economics, 1991–2011, Viewed Through A Bibliographic Survey," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, vol. 38(4), pages 431-462, December.
    9. David Card & Stefano DellaVigna, 2013. "Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(1), pages 144-161, March.
    10. Coats, A W, 1971. "The Role of Scholarly Journals in the History of Economics: An Essay," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 9(1), pages 29-44, March.
    11. Coats, A W, 1969. "The American Economic Association's Publications: An Historical Perspective," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 7(1), pages 57-68, March.
    12. Pedro Garcia Duarte & Gilberto Tadeu Lima, 2012. "Microfoundations Reconsidered," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 14869.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. José Edwards & Yann Giraud & Christophe Schinckus, 2018. "A quantitative turn in the historiography of economics?," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(4), pages 283-290, October.
    2. Lima, Pedro G. & Teixeira, Pedro N. & Silva, Sandra T., 2021. "Major Streams in the Economics of Inequality: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of the Literature since 1950s," IZA Discussion Papers 14777, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Yushan Hu & Ben G. Li, 2021. "The production economics of economics production," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(1), pages 228-255, February.
    4. Lutz Bornmann & Alexander Butz & Klaus Wohlrabe, 2018. "What are the top five journals in economics? A new meta-ranking," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(6), pages 659-675, February.
    5. Verónica Amarante & Marisa Bucheli & Mariana Rodriguez, 2024. "Research Networks and Publications in Economics: Evidence from a Small Developing Country," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 15(2), pages 5571-5598, June.
    6. Allen Bellas & Lea-Rachel Kosnik, 2019. "Which leading journal leads? Idea diffusion in economics research journals," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 57(3), pages 901-921, September.
    7. Önder Ali Sina & Yilmazkuday Hakan, 2020. "Thirty-Five Years of Peer-Reviewed Publishing by North American Economics PhDs: Quantity, Quality, and Beyond," Open Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 3(1), pages 70-85, January.
    8. Syed Hasan & Robert Breunig, 2021. "Article length and citation outcomes," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 7583-7608, September.
    9. Fabian Scheidegger & Andre Briviba & Bruno S. Frey, 2023. "Behind the curtains of academic publishing: strategic responses of economists and business scholars," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(8), pages 4765-4790, August.
    10. Claude Diebolt & Michael Haupert, 2021. "The Role of Cliometrics in History and Economics," Working Papers of BETA 2021-26, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    11. Paldam Martin, 2021. "Methods Used in Economic Research: An Empirical Study of Trends and Levels," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 15(1), pages 28-42, January.
    12. Lea†Rachel Kosnik, 2018. "A Survey Of Jel Codes: What Do They Mean And Are They Used Consistently?," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(1), pages 249-272, February.
    13. Thiago Dumont Oliveira & Marwil J. Dávila-Fernández, 2020. "From modelmania to datanomics? The rise of mathematical and quantitative methods in three top economics journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 123(1), pages 51-70, April.
    14. Muhammad Asali, 2019. "A tale of two tracks," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(3), pages 323-337, May.
    15. Grażyna Bukowska & Jan Fałkowski & Beata Łopaciuk-Gonczaryk, 2014. "Teaming up or writing alone - authorship strategies in leading Polish economic journals," Working Papers 2014-29, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw.
    16. Lorenzo Ductor & Bauke Visser, 2023. "Concentration of power at the editorial boards of economics journals," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(2), pages 189-238, April.
    17. Benno Torgler & Marco Piatti, 2011. "A Century of American Economic Review," Working Papers 2011.27, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    18. Laurent Linnemer & Michael Visser, 2016. "The Most Cited Articles from the Top-5 Journals (1991-2015)," Working Papers 2016-26, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics.
    19. Daniel S. Hamermesh, 2018. "Citations in Economics: Measurement, Uses, and Impacts," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 56(1), pages 115-156, March.
    20. Amarante, Veronica & Zurbrigg, Julieta, 2022. "The marginalization of southern researchers in Development," World Development Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 26(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • A14 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Sociology of Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02735838. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.