The economics of religion is a relatively new field of research in economics. This survey serves two purposes – it is backward-looking in that it traces the historical and sociological origins of this field, and it is forward-looking in that it examines the insights and research themes that...

This paper examines the practical usefulness of two new journal performance metrics, namely the Eigenfactor score, which may be interpreted as measuring “Journal Influence”, and the Article Influence score, using the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science (hereafter ISI) data for 2009 for the...

Ähnlich wie Niklas Luhmann entwickelt auch Douglass Norths ökonomische Geschichtstheorie eine spezifische Diagnose der Moderne. Das vorliegende Korreferat diskutiert in fünf Schritten, zu welchen Fragen sich das (ordonomische) Rational- Choice-Programm von einer solchen Diagnose der Moderne...

The arrow-of-time phenomena are everywhere in the physical world, biological systems, and human society. Despite its great importance in physics, the second law of thermodynamics can only successfully explain small percentages of these arrow-of-time phenomena in the physical world, and generally...

Do citations accumulate too slowly in the social sciences to be used to assess the quality of recent articles? I investigate whether this is the case using citation data for all articles in economics and political science published in 2006 and indexed in the Web of Science. Surprisingly,...

This article presents a bibliographic review of the gravitational model in sociophysics since its origins in Newton’s conception. Considering the crucial role played by physics in expanding our understanding about social sciences, I will preserve such an approach throughout the article....

This chapter treats a variety of epistemological issues surrounding generative explanation in the social sciences, and discusses the role of agent-based computational models in generative social science.