Gravity model: A bibliometric analysis and detailed overview

Abstract

Originating from Newton’s gravitational theory which was posed in 1687; the concept of gravity equation was primarily used by Tinbergen in the field of international trade analysis in 1962. After Tinbergen, Pöyhönen, Linnemann, Anderson, Santos and Tenreyro, Bergstrand and Egger, Deardorff and also Wooldridge developed the theory of gravity. And gravity model has become progressively well-liked in the academic publications. The aim of this study is to determine the literature belonging to the years between 1980 which is the starting point for “gravity” related studies’ being published on Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus and 2020 to execute a bibliometric review of this literature. Thereby, it targets to supply a perspective concerning the nature of the studies executed on the subject of gravity model, so as to point out the lack of the bibliometric analysis-using studies on the field of international trade. In this study, we collected the data between 1980-2020 from Scopus and Web of Science database and analysed using the Gephi, Vosviewer and R Studio programmes in order to be used in our bibliometric analysis. The results showed that U.S.A., Germany and China are the countries which have the highest number of publications in this field, and the journals with the highest number of publications are “World Economy”, “Journal of International Economics” and “Review of International Economics”. The fact that three programmes have been simultaneously used in the study is demonstrative of the originality of the paper.