TREND OF SUBJECTS PUBLISHED IN ECONOMICS JOURNALS 1969-2007

We describe the evolution of subject areas published in economics over four decades and calculate the percentage of articles published in each Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) subject category, with and without weighting by Eigenfactor.com's Article Influence (AI). Finance, Development, and Industrial Organization have seen their share of total articles rise over the past four decades while Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Labor have seen their share fall. We use JEL codes to define specialty journals and find that more specialty journals tend to increase the overall percentage share for that subject. This effect is ambiguous when re-weighted by AI.