The Anatomy of a Finance Paper: Evidence from the Journal of Finance, 2016–2025

Workbook containing process and data used in the paper. see the README worksheet We describe every article the Journal of Finance published from 2016 through 2025, 730 in all, from the full text of each paper. Articles grew about 10% longer, from 41 to 45 pages, and their reference lists grew 23%, from 48 to 59 references. The added citations went to older and newer work alike: the mean age of cited work was unchanged, while the share of older citations going to the most-cited works fell from 10.8% to 7.2%. Tables per paper declined and figures per paper rose by 70%. Linear regression without a specific design remained the leading method in every year, and no method category rose or fell steadily. The subject mix shifted, with asset pricing falling from 24% to 16% of papers and banking rising from 10% to 17%, and the empirical share declined by about 1.2 percentage points a year as theory grew. Team size, the concentration of authorship across institutions, and funding disclosure show no trend. Over a decade in which the field debated how finance research should be done, what changed at its flagship journal was how much of the literature each paper carried and how it displayed its evidence, not who wrote the papers or how they identified their claims.