On the divergence of research paths in evolutionary economics: a comprehensive bibliometric account

In the last two decades there has been a noticeable increase in published research in evolutionary economics. The idea that formal modelling is a sine qua non condition for establishing a rigours and coherence scientific frame, has led to an over concern with formalization issues among evolutionary researchers. The general perception is that formalization lags behind the appreciative work. Notwithstanding, this general reading has not yet been supported by real data analysis. This work presents a comprehensive survey on evolutionary economics, intending at exploring the main research paths and contributions of this theorizing framework using bibliometric methods. This documentation effort is based on an extensive review of the abstracts from articles published in all economic journals gathered from the Econlit database over the past fifty years. Evolutionary contributions apparently have not converged to an integrated approach. In the present paper, we document the more important paths emergent in this field. Before 1990, the importance of published evolutionary related research is almost negligible - more than 90% of total papers were published after that date. Our results further show two rather extreme main research strands: ‘History of Economic Thought and Methodology’ and ‘Games’. Moreover, formal approaches have a reasonable and increasing share of published papers between 1969 and 2005. In contrast, purely empirical-related works are relatively scarce, involving a meagre and stagnant percentage of published works. This recalls for a need to redirect the evolutionary research agenda.