Methodological Trends and Differences: A Comparative Analysis of Economics and Psychology

This study provides a large-scale comparison of how economics and psychology use research methods to investigate substantive phenomena. By mapping these methodological trends, we aim to foster greater interdisciplinary understanding and reflection on disciplinary norms. 3,845 articles from top journals published between 2008 and 2024 were categorized using large language model-assisted content analysis. Key findings reveal significant methodological differences: economics showed a higher prevalence of nonexperimental causal inference and theoretical papers, while psychology had more experimental and correlational studies. Additionally, trend analyses revealed a steady increase in the use of causal inference methods and a decrease in theoretical papers in economics, while psychology’s methodological approaches remained largely stable over the same period. These distinct trajectories suggest that psychology could leverage causal inference for questions where experiments are infeasible, while economics could adopt experimental designs to further enhance internal validity. Supplementary materials, including journal selection reasoning and categorization prompts, are available on the OSF project at https://osf.io/d2z5c/.