CoFE - Collaboration in Financial Economics

What is this?

I have collected acknowledgement sections from all research papers published between 1997 and 2011 in the following six journals: The Journal of Finance, The Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Money, Credit & Banking, Journal of Banking and Finance.

The data contain consolidated and hand-checked information on 14,531 researchers:

We used it to construct and study the network of informal collaboration:

You can explore interactively at michael-e-rose.github.io/CoFE.

Where do I find information?

The data, how we collected it and what it can be used for, is described in detail in Rose, Michael E. and Georg, Co-Pierre (2021): "What 5,000 Acknowledgements Tell Us About Informal Collaboration in Financial Economics", Research Policy 50(6) (PDF) When using this data, please cite the article.

How do I use this?

The file you're after is acks_min.json.

In Python, you can get the most recent version of the data like so

from json import loads
from urllib.request import urlopen

COFE = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Michael-E-Rose/CoFE/master/acks_min.json'

acks = loads(urlopen(COFE).read().decode("utf-8"))['data']

acks is a list of dictionaries (entries explained below). You can iterate over the items to generate a network with networkx:

from itertools import product

import networkx as nx

G = nx.Graph()
for item in acks:
    # Authors
    auths = [a['label'] for a in item['authors']]
    G.add_nodes_from(coms)
    # Commenters
    coms = [c['label'] for c in item.get('com', [])]
    G.add_nodes_from(coms)
    # Links
    links = list(product(coms, auths))
    G.add_edges_from(links)

Filelist

• acks.json is a hierarchically organized json file listing all information we have for each article (see variable list below). The primary is key is always the title of the article.
• acks_min.json is a minimized version of acks.json (no idents and superfluous blanks).
• consolidate_acks.py generates above two files using data in folder data.

Variables

• title (string): The title as stated in the pdf
• prev (list of strings): Titles of previous versions of the research article
• journal (string): Short version of the journal the article was published in
• year (integer): The publication year
• auth (list of dictionaries): Scopus ID or name of Author
• editor (string): Name(s) of specifically acknowledged editors
• ref (integer or list of dictionaries): Names or numbers of acknowledged referees
• com (integer or list of dictionaries): Names or numbers of commenters, that are not specifically acknowledged referees, discussants, editors or phd commitee members
• dis (integer or list of dictionaries): Names or numbers of specifically thanked discussants
• ind (integer or list of strings): Number or names of industry professionals (Note: Not every volume has been screened for this information)
• ra (integer or list of strings): Number of or names of specifically thanked research assitants (Note: Not every volume has been screened for this information)
• con (integer or list of strings): Names or number of conferences the article was presented
• sem (integer or list of strings): Names or number of universities, (central) banks, institutes, etc. where the article has been presented
• jel (list of strings): Listed JEL-Codes as stated in the pdf
• jel3 (list of strings): Listed JEL-Codes as stated on other sources (previous working papers, SSRN version, etc.)
• data (list of strings): Names of persons that provided data (Note: Not every volume has been screened for this information)
• misc (list of strings): Miscellaneous information collected, e.g. Prices won
• ord (list of strings): The ordering of categories within the entire acknowledgment section (Note: Not every volume has been screened for this information)

Information for authors include

• name (string): The name in upper-case of the researcher as stated in the paper
• scopus_id (string): The ID of the researcher's profile in the Scopus database
• label (string): The display name of the researcher's profile in the Scopus database
• corresponding (boolean): True if author is corresponding author (Note: Not every volume has been screened for this information)
• aff (list of strings): Standardized affiliations of author as stated in the pdf
• fund (list of strings): Funding sources of the author received
• phd (list of strings): Names of author's specifically acknowledged PhD committee members
• vis (list of strings): Standardized affilations the author visited during publiction
• former (list of strings): Previous standardized affilations of the author

Information for com, dis, phd, editor include

• name (string): The name in upper-case of the researcher as stated in the paper
• scopus_id (string): The ID of the researcher's profile in the Scopus database - not available everywhere
• label (string): The standardized name of the researcher, which is the display name of the researcher's profile in the Scopus database if scopus_id is present, and a standardized version of name otherwise