Social Network Analysis of Collaboration Patterns Among Economists in China Based on Chinese- and English-Language Publications

In this paper, we analyze the collaboration network among Chinese economists for the period between 2010 and 2021, during which the economics profession has gone through a great transformation in China. We collect publication data from more than 350 journals using the Scopus and CNKI databases, considering both English- and Chinese-language publication outlets. We analyze the structure of the collaboration network at both the university and individual levels. We identify key universities and superstar economists in these networks. We find convergence in the patterns of collaboration between the English- and Chinese-language publication networks, where the English one has shown increasing integration over time. We obtain that the university-level network can be described as a core-periphery network with 985 universities in the core, while the individual-level collaboration network as a small world connected by superstar economists