Fifty Years of HOPE: Changing Priorities in the Historiography of Economics

Fifty years past A. W. Coats’s (1969) “Research Priorities in the History of Economics”—the first article in History of Political Economy (HOPE)—the opportunity arises to check how such priorities have changed over time. Drawing from the 3,084 documents published in HOPE volumes 1–50, this survey analyzes a series of elements within the HOPE literature set, and those related to the broader historiography of economics (i.e., including not only publications, but also conferences, workshops, the development of institutions, and several reactions to this research project). It uses bibliometrics and network analysis to produce a classification system arising from the reference lists in all articles published in HOPE’s regular issues (1–4): 1969–2018.