Simon says
Lets do some Herbert Simonology.
According to the OpenAlex database, Herbert Simon published a total of
Same, but for his most cited work (if you like that kind of stuff):
The book in 1955 that got Simon to 35K citations is A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice, a classic in many fields. But also ON A CLASS OF SKEW DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS, which is a well know paper in complex systems that discuss heavy-tail distributions appearing in many different natural systems. Here's the full table of his work:
He is known to have publish in a wide variety of field of studies. Here we show the count of papers with associated primary topics:
You can select the sum of citations by topics instead of the count of citing articles, if you want. You'll see that the ordering change a little bit, and the distributoin is a bit more heavytail. It is wild to think that Simon has published over 15 papers on Sport Psychology and Performance, while being mostly known for his work on bounded rationality, complex systems, and artificial intelligence.
Now, this is what Simon has done. But I wanted to know who engaged the most with Simon's work. To answer that, we compiled all the papers who cited Simon, by year. With this in hand, we could create the following timeseries:
In the default view, we note the different waves of interest for Simon's work in Artificial Intelligence. As expected, Economics and Econometrics really like him, most likely for his work on bounded rationality and game theory (confirmed by looking at top topics instead of subfields, aka Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics). I was surprised to see the surge of interests for his work in behavioral economics starting in the 2000s. For some reason, I would've thought that it would've been way earlier. Anyway, the data is there to play with. Here's a small table to find relevant categories using keywords.
Table to search categories
In the timeseries, all the subfields are independent of each other. It is informative to look at how clusters of subfields are citing Simon. In the following plot, we look at all incoming citations by time periodto Simon's work.
d3.scaleSqrt().range(3,10). That is, we map sum of citations to a Square root scales bounded between 3 and 10). Additionally, nodes are colored according to their field of research. This is a very neat way to know which subfields citing Simon tend to show up together.
Using knowledge from the previous plot, the default values show subfields citing Simon in the 2000s (say 2000-2005). You can see that now Economics and Econometrics took over the fandom, with Strategy and Management being second. If you go back in the 1960s, you'll see that Simon was originally popular within Artificial intelligence Counting all the subfields, we can see that there there 29 different subfields citing Simon, spanning about 10 different fields (colors)!
If you are interested which subfields are citing which papers, here is a small table summarizing that information.