A Scientometric Exploration of Creative Ideas in
Economic Sciences: Nobel Prize Laureates (2000-2014)
Meen Chul Kim, Yongjun Zhu, Qing Ping, Yuanyuan Feng, and Chaomei Chen
MOTIVATION
Can we quantitatively investigate:
1) How creative ideas in science are
formulated? (creation)
RESULTS
Creation
Bursting Keywords
DISCUSSION
Diffusion
Bursting Keywords
2) The creative ideas have diverged into
various issues such as labor market
and economic governance.
List of the Laureates (chronologically)
We define a creative idea in science as:
 Concerted research work of a Nobel
Prize awardee
 Field of interest: Nobel Prize winners
from 2000 till 2014 in economics
Heckman, McFadden, Akerlof, Spence, Stiglitz,
Kahneman, Smith, Engle, Granger, Kydland,
Prescott, Aumann, Schelling, Phelps, Hurwicz,
Maskin, Myerson, Krugman, Ostrom, Williamson,
Diamond, Mortensen, Pissarides, Sargent, Sims,
Roth, Shapley, Fama, Hansen, Shiller, Tirole
Diffusion
Intellectual Landscape
Intellectual Landscape
Phase-1: 1980-1998
Phase-1: 1980-1998
CONCLUSION
Data Collection
From the Web of Science, we collected:
2) Diffusion: 134,866 articles “citing” the
creative literature (1980-2015)
Quantitative Analysis
We employ a scientometric tool,
CiteSpace (Chen 2006), which captures:
1) Keywords with bursting attention
2) Citation-based intellectual structure
1) Successive research such as
intertemporal equilibrium model,
estimating profitable asset pricing
and socio-ecological economics
were influenced by the creative ones.
2) Economic research around the
laureates has been going divergent
over time.
METHOD
1) Creation: bibliographic records of the
awardees’ 1,745 articles (1980-2015)
Creation
1) The awardees’ works were mainly
created from macroeconomic tests
and time serial economic analysis.
2) How their creativeness is diffused into
successive research? (diffusion)
OPERATIONALIZATION
In what follows, we identified:
Phase-2: 1999-2015
Phase-2: 1999-2015
 We comprehensively explored the
creation and diffusion of influential
ideas.
 We plan to apply the approach to other
domains to draw more generalized
understanding and interpretations.
CORE REFERENCE
Chen, C. (2006). CiteSpace II: Detecting
and visualizing emerging trends and
transient patterns in scientific literature.
JASIST, 57(3), 359-377.