Eli Heckscher Today: A Bibliometric Picture

Abstract

The citations of Heckscher (1879-1952) in journals included in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index do not, of course, give a complete picture of his significance as a scholar and in public debate. For reasons linked to the selection process, there is a tendency for his English-language scholarly works to be overrepresented in the databases at the expense of his Swedish writings and political contributions. Nevertheless, it is not uninteresting to get an idea of the quantity and pattern of citations of Heckscher in mainly English-language scholarly journals. In the period 1986-2002 he was cited less than Myrdal and Wicksell but approximately as much as Ohlin, and more than Cassel and Lindahl. Though his list of publications includes more than 1100 items, about 80 per cent of the citations pertain to different versions of just four works: Mercantilism, the large but untranslated Sveriges ekonomiska historia från Gustav Vasa, the shorter An Economic History of Sweden, and his article "The Effect of Foreign Trade on the Distribution of Income".