A review of scientific productions in the field of economic history (1999-2023): a scientometric study

Extended AbstractIntroductionEconomic history shows that economic changes over time can significantly affect society's social, political and cultural structures. For example, the Industrial Revolution, which led to significant changes in the methods of production and distribution of wealth, also affected the formation of social classes and political structures. Also, economic history helps us identify economic growth and recession patterns and better understand their causes and consequences. Financial history is a branch of history that was less studied before the 20th century, but in recent years it has been noticed by researchers. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out scientometric research for a better and more systematic understanding of the research in this field.Meanwhile, scientometric research in economic history is valuable for several reasons: It provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of the intellectual landscape and identifies key researchers, institutions, and countries contributing to the field. In addition, this type of research helps a lot in understanding the trends, patterns, and dynamics of historical economic research. The scientometric analysis enables the evaluation of research impact, identification of impact and importance of specific articles, authors, or research journals, identification of research gaps, and future research trends by analyzing existing literature and areas with limited or no research. It also enables researchers to foster collaborations, promote interdisciplinary research, help track research trends and emerging topics, and identify evolving research clusters, hot topics, and emerging research topics, leading to improved research results and informed decision-making. In this regard, leading research aims to analyze and illustrate scientific productions in economic history. Similar efforts have been made in the history of Iran, including the book Economic and Social History of Iran and Iranians by Adnan Mazhari (1969), which includes the economic history of early civilizations, ancient Iran, the Sassanids, Macedonian and Greek periods, Eastern Iranians and Parthians, the Arab world. Islam consists of the return to civilization, the dominance of the Turks and Tatars, and the Safavid era. The book "Economic History of Iran" by Charles Esei (1983) deals with topics such as social construction, internal trade, transportation, agriculture, industry, oil, and finance in the history of Iran. The book Owner and Farmer in Iran, written by Lambton (2014), emphasizes the critical role of village interaction in determining the stability and income of the government and includes the history of income management and property ownership from Islam to today. Petroshevski and his colleagues (1987), in the book Socio-Economic History of Iran in the Mughal Period, narrates the rise and fall of Iran's social and economic situation during the Ilkhanate and Mongol periods. The work of Yervand Abrahamian (2022) with the title has a completely scientific approach to the economy of contemporary Iranian history, which is manifested in attention to economic factors, the working class, economic imbalance, and statistical and documented analysis of economic policies. Among the researchers, Dehnad and Jamkarani (2022), in a study on the evolution of financial literacy and financial behavior, concluded that initially, researchers focused on demographic and socio-economic factors. However, this field later expanded, covering topics such as behavioral and psychological constructs that influence financial behavior.Materials & MethodsThe research method is scientometric and is done with Excel and VOS Viewer software. The statistical population of the research was 6514 scientific articles from Science Direct scientific database between 1999 and 2023, which were extracted and analyzed. After entering the data from the scientific database into the software, 418 nodes, 11 clusters, and 3284 links were identified by repeating 8 times.Discussion & ResultThe research results show that The trend of publication of articles is upward among journals, research in economic history, and among the words economic growth, economic history, innovation, institutions, economic development, growth, human capital, and immigration are top in terms of repetition. The categories of economic growth, development, institution, regulations, profitability, and the business cycle are topics that, despite being very popular, are no longer as necessary in this trend as in the last decade, and the categories of monetary policies, energy, mining, natural resources, government capacity, and Covid- 19 were among the hottest categories.ConclusionIn response to the first question of the research, a scientific map of the field of economic history was drawn, and based on the findings of the study, economic growth, economic history, innovation, institutions, economic development, growth, human capital, and immigration have been very popular among historians.