This paper examines the small world hypothesis. The first part of the paper presents empirical evidence on the evolution of a particular world: the world of journal publishing economists during the period 1970-2000. We find that in the 1970's the world of economics was a collection of islands....

We study the evolution of the influence of journals over the period 1970-2017. In the early 1970's, a number of journals had similar influence, but by 1995, the 'Top 5' journals - QJE, AER, RES, Econometrica, and JPE - had acquired a major lead. This dominance has remained more or less unchanged...