A Mapping Of The Literature On Econophysics

Econophysics is a relatively young discipline, being an interdisciplinary approach that applies methods and tools from physics in the economics, for studying the financial markets, or other economical phenomena. The objective is to create a mapping of the most used keywords in this topic, as well as the connections between countries and authors, based on citations. This article studies the literature on the topic of econophysics, using the Web of Science database. Bibliometric analysis was made with the free software VOSviewer, after extracting the data from 1364 articles, since the conception of the topic in 1996 until the year 2020. The software offered a useful network representation between the main keywords used in the field, or between countries and citations, and finally between authors, based on citations. The results evidenced a constant interest on the topic, with main keywords: †econophysics†, †financial markets†, †dynamics†, †model†and †stock market†, and the relationships between countries and authors were shown, with the United States, China and Italy being the leading ones. We also found that the most cited authors are H.E. Stanley, the inventor of the word econophysics, Wei-Xing Zhou and Didier Sornette. This article shows the main concepts used in econophysics, which can serve as an indicator of its directions of research, as well as the top contributors in the field, since its inception. Future directions include expanding the analysis to other databases, or to concepts relevant to econophysics, to identify trends in research and the growth of the field.