Do popularity of topics spread from core to periphery journals?

Abstract

We examine the popularity of competing topics of macroeconomics by tracing publication frequencies of these topics as recorded in the EconLit database over the period from 1969 through 1996. We find some evidence in the data that the popularity of a topic in the core journals relative to the periphery journals decreases as the topic gets old. We, however, find that an increasing interest on a topic in the periphery journals Granger causes an increase in interest on the same topic in the core journals but not vice versa. The evidence, therefore, suggests that the popularity of topics do not gradually spread from the core journals to the periphery journals. Nevertheless, we find that one could economize their literature search by focusing on that smaller set of core journals.