CollEc

CollEc is an interesting new service from RePEc that lets users find connections between economists. As well as showing Erdös number* like paths between economists, it generates two statistics:

Closeness ranking looks at how far an author is, on average, to all others economists.

Betweenness ranking looks how many times an author appears on average on shortest paths between all other economists.

These can give you an idea of how central or typical an economist any one person is as well as how involved they are in mainstream economic research.

Here is the page for me. As there are about 30,000 economists registered in RePEc I am moderately centrally located and quite involved in mainstream networks. Among my coauthors, Ed Barbier is most centrally located and plugged in. Nick Hanley (not a coauthor, current visitor to the Crawford School) is really connected.

I think this could be a good predictor of your chances of getting published in a top journal in economics :)

* Probably we should compute Stiglitz Numbers as I think he is the most famous, most centrally placed economist.