Background

Academic journals focused in economics can reflect a lot about the economic science status in Mexico. In this article, we study female authorship, academic networks and the topics discussed in Mexican economic journals from 2000 to 2017.

Methodology

Using data for six of the main economic journals in Mexico from 2000 to 2017 we study the authors as well as the subjects discussed in them. With the author information we study how the presence of female authors has evolved in Mexican economic journals and, also, the interactions among scholars from different institutions. On the other hands, we use text analysis on the abstracts to determine if certain keywords related to Mexico’s main economic problems or vulnerable groups were mentioned.

Results

First, we observe that women have acquired a greater presence -measured both as the percentage of articles with at least one female author (an increase of 31 percentage points) as well as the percentage of authors that are women (an increase of 14 percentage points). On the other hand, interuniversity networks seem to be quite rare during this period: the UNAM’s coauthorships with the IPN, the most common source of interuniversity collaboration, represents only 7.7% of its coauthorships. Finally, both important themes for Mexico’s economy as well as vulnerable groups are not mentioned in most of the abstracts.

Conclusions

Mexican economic journals can be improved on many accounts. Given that science benefits from diversity, it is desirable to have more female authors as well as more interuniversity collaboration networks. On the other hand, the topics studied in Mexican economic journals are mostly not related neither with Mexico’s main economic challenges nor with vulnerable groups.