MACS30122 Final Project - Netrunners

Portrait of Economic Academia: Evidence from Top 20 Economics Journals from 2012 to 2022

Research Questions and Relevance

• We form a whole picture of the current Economic academia by
  1. identifying its collaboration patterns on Top Econ Journals through SNA
  2. research topics evolvement across time and institutions through dynamic TM.
• We ask the following research questions:
  1. SNA:
     • What are the network features and collaboration patterns at the institutional and tier level? Density, centrality, cross-rank freedom?
  2. TM:
     • How research topics vary and evolve across time and institutions?
     • For each topic, who are the most important contributors?
  3. SNA & TM:
     • Do centralities in the network research the same topics?
     • For a centrality, who are parallel peers, who are distinct peers?
• We have the following interesting findings:
  1. SNA:
     • Top tier institutions are more likely to collaborate with institutions of similar levels; but for lower tier institutions, they often collaborate with those from very different tiers. In other words, an institution’s cross-rank/tier collaboration likelihood decreases as its tier/rank gets higher.
  2. TM:
     • Topics are stable in trends across time with some fluctuations but can vary a lot across different institutions.
  3. SNA & TM:
     • Centralities of university-institutions are relatively similar in what they research, but World Bank shows a large discrepancy against university-institutions.

Data Sources

1. Econpapers
2. AEA
3. IDEAS
4. Google Scholar

Required Packages (can also see the requirements.txt)

1. bertopic==0.14.0
2. pandas==1.5.1
3. plotly==5.11.0
4. selenium==4.4.3
5. umap-learn==0.5.3
6. nltk==3.7
7. numpy==1.21.6
8. networkx==2.7.1
9. bs4==4.11.1

Structure of Repo

• codes folder:
  1. ipynb: contains the Jupyter Notebook for data collection and analysis
  2. py: contains scripts to scrape author/articles
  3. sql: contains the file to create database
  4. all_in_one_codes.ipynb: main codes collected from the above 3 folders
• data folder:
  1. authors: contains html files for Google Scholars profiles
  2. csv: contains csv files used for database construction
  3. gephifiles: contains the gexf and Gephi Project files that uses for network visualization
  4. journals: contains the raw data for Top 20 Economic Journals
• present folder:
  1. graph: contains all the graphs we produce for visualizations
  2. ppt: contain both the presented version slides and an updated version

Contributions:

1. Data Scraping and Cleaning:
   • Journal Top 1-6: Jerry Cheng
   • Journal Top 7-9: Yicheng Zhang
   • Journal Top 10-20: Hongzhang Xie
   • Author_Article Database: Jerry Cheng
   • Affiliation Database: Jerry Cheng
   • Author Database: Jerry Cheng, Yicheng Zhang
   • Affiliation Ranking Match: Yicheng Zhang
   • Missing Abstracts Matching: Yicheng Zhang
2. Data Analysis and Visualization:
   • Social Network Analysis: Jerry Cheng, Yicheng Zhang
   • Topic Modeling: Jerry Cheng
3. Proposal, Slides, Progress Report, Final Report:
   • Literature review: Hongzhang Xie
   • Others: Evenly distributed
4. Codes Cleaning:
   • Jerry Cheng, Hongzhang Xie
5. Video Recording:
   • Yicheng Zhang

In-class Presentation Sildes

• Presented Version
• Updated Version

Demonstration Video

• Video Link

Final Report

• Report Link

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Shield:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.