The Marketplace of New Economic Ideas

George J. Stigler, in his Nobel price lecture of 1982, suggested that the economics of information could be applied to the marketplace of new economic ideas. Economists enter this marketplace ? economic knowledge ? principally on the demand side, where they attempt to distinguish new and fundamental ideas. The following questions are relevant upon entering the demand side of this marketplace: What journals should I read? What are the important research themes? What are the important papers? At the juncture between the economics of information and other social sciences, co-word and citation analyses are proposed as search instruments in the pursuit of fundamental research themes and articles. These methods are specifically applied to economic knowledge in this article.economics of information; citation analysis; co-word analysis