On the divergence of research paths inevolutionary economics:a comprehensive bibliometric account

In the last two decades there has been a noticeable increase in published research inevolutionary economics. The idea that formal modelling is a sine qua non condition forestablishing a rigours and coherence scientific frame, has led to an over concern withformalization issues among evolutionary researchers. The general perception is thatformalization lags behind the appreciative work. Notwithstanding, this general reading hasnot yet been supported by real data analysis.This work presents a comprehensive survey on evolutionary economics, intending atexploring the main research paths and contributions of this theorizing framework usingbibliometric methods. This documentation effort is based on an extensive review of theabstracts from articles published in all economic journals gathered from the Econlit databaseover the past fifty years.Evolutionary contributions apparently have not converged to an integrated approach. In thepresent paper, we document the more important paths emergent in this field. Before 1990, theimportance of published evolutionary related research is almost negligible - more than 90% oftotal papers were published after that date. Our results further show two rather extreme mainresearch strands: ‘History of Economic Thought and Methodology’ and ‘Games’. Moreover,formal approaches have a reasonable and increasing share of published papers between 1969and 2005. In contrast, purely empirical-related works are relatively scarce, involving a meagreand stagnant percentage of published works. This recalls for a need to redirect theevolutionary research agenda...