Temporal Patterns in Economics Research

Using the corpus of abstracts of economics papers, as available from the RePEc dataset, we find that most papers match to papers from the same year, indicating strong common trends in the economics literature. 

Nevertheless, matches as long as 14 years apart are statistically significant, suggesting there are topics that last as long. Finally, the average duration of a match has dropped from around 4 years during 1990–2005 to about 1 year starting in 2010.