The Focus on Poverty in the Most Influential Journals in Economics: A Bibliometric Analysis of the "Blue Ribbon" Journals

Scientific publications tend to influence policymakers significantly. Despite the scientific and social importance of poverty today, the attention the top economic journals (American Economic Review; Econometrica; International Economic Review; Journal of Economic Theory; Journal of Political Economy; Quarterly Journal of Economics; Review of Economic Studies) pay to the matter is not clear, particularly in the so-called "Blue Ribbon" journals (and Review of Economics and Statistics). On the basis of bibliometric techniques, we analyzed all 27,322 articles published in the "Blue Ribbon" journals from 1970 to 2018. This is the first study on the scientific attention paid to poverty by the most influential journals in the field of economics. Two main findings can be highlighted: (i) the scientific attention paid to poverty in the Blue Ribbon journals is relatively meager, but it has observed a positive trend, increasing from a modest 0.36 percent of the total articles published in the 1970s to 1.92 percent of total publications in the 2010s; and (ii) the relative weight of specific poverty subtopics has significantly changed over the last 50 years, shifting from a focus on defining and measuring poverty in the earlier decades to policy-related issues in the most recent period (2000 onward).