Disciplines at the crossroads: scientific re-orientation of economics and chemistry after German reunification

We empirically approach the identification and measurement of research topic differences by the example of East and West German chemists as well as economists and business economists before and alter German reunification. The political transition, which came along with German reunification, is expected to have influenced the research topics of East German scientists in the two disciplines to differing degrees. Our dataset builds on dissertation titles in economics and business administration as well as chemistry from 1980 to 2010. We use university affiliation and year of the dissertation to train a structural topic model and test the model on a set of unseen dissertation titles. Subsequently, we compare the topic distribution of each title pair with cosine similarity and a linear regression framework. Our results on East German economics and business administration suggest substantial differences before the reunification and a rapid assimilation in research topics thereafter. In chemistry we observe minor differences before the reunification and a slightly increasing similarity after the reunification.