Development and interdisciplinarity: additional insights on the ‘economics silo’

Recent scientometric evidence published in this journal (Mitra, S., Palmer, M, Vuong, V. (2020). Development and Interdisciplinary: A citation analysis. World Development, 135, 105076; hereafter MPV) suggests that development is not an interdisciplinary field as it predominantly references mainstream economics and shows limited interaction with other disciplines. This article validates the study of MPV and extends it in several ways. First, it introduces an alternative method for identifying the economics background of development scholars by matching bibliometric data with the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) author database. Second, it applies an extensive multi-level citation analysis, based on all journal references available from the Web of Science database. A replication of the cited-reference analysis of 29,619 articles across 17 development journals confirms MPV’s findings: the lack of interdisciplinarity in development is driven primarily by research by authors with an economics background. However, this study estimates a much larger share of such research than MPV. Third, a regression analysis reveals that works authored by economists receive significantly more citations. Fourth, a comparative analysis of author affiliations shows that articles with an economics background are predominantly associated with renowned (international) policy institutions, particularly the World Bank. Fifth, a discursive analysis of article abstracts based on structural topic modeling identifies research topics associated with (non-)economists, and thus, higher or lower levels of interdisciplinarity. Overall, the findings highlight several policy implications as development research conducted by economists differs significantly across multiple dimensions, with these differences being even more pronounced among ‘top-five’ economists.