Institutional Economics in the Mirror of 2023 Publications

Bibliographic studies of scientific publications have become popular nowadays. This paper attempts to answer the question – what is happening with institutional economics in Russia. The empirical base is data from the scientific electronic library Elibrary.ru on articles of 2023. At the first stage of the study, a selection of journals was carried out (76 in total). The selection criterion was belonging to Q1 of the Higher Attestation Commission list and inclusion in the top 100 journals according to the Science Index rating (Economics, Economic Sciences). The selected journals are characterised by their founders, place of publication and year of foundation. It is revealed that institutional economics is mentioned in the editorial policy of nine journals. At the second stage, we selected articles published in 76 journals by the presence of the terms "institution" and "institutional" in their titles and keywords (a total of 191 articles). We found a rather high concentration of these articles in the core of journals whose editorial policy either mentions institutional issues or whose thematic orientation is extremely broad. At the third stage, articles were sorted by annotations and keywords by expert means, and publications related to economic institutionalism (96 in total) were singled out. The distribution of these articles across journals and affiliations is shown, and the characteristics of co-authorship and collaborations are identified. The metadata of the articles was then used to conduct a content analysis of the nature and thematic focus of the articles, the data and methods used, and the terminology of the research. To better understand the nature of the research being conducted, the content analysis was supplemented by reviewing the content of the articles. The analysis made it possible to draw a conclusion about the predominance of empirical studies. Among theoretical articles there is an orientation towards the formation of original author's concepts on the basis of "synthesis" and "interdisciplinarity", as well as the so-called "conceptual creativity". In a significant part of empirical works the elaboration of theoretical foundations of research is insufficient.