Social sciences recently witnessed an increase in multidisciplinary studies. Economists are part of this movement. Do they have an impact on other disciplines? Few studies are concerned with the transfer of knowledge from one discipline to another. Our paper tries to shed some light on this issue in the specific case of the contribution of economics to historical research in Canada in the last three decades. Is the use of economic tools widespread? Does it follow an upward trend over the period? Is it related to research topic, period treated or historiographical tradition? Is there a difference between Anglophone and Francophone historians? These are some of the questions explored.

Our approach is bibliometrical. AIl articles published in La Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française and in Canadian Historical Review from 1970 to 1996 are classified according to their use of references to books and articles belonging to three categories: cliometrics, traditional economic history, and statistics.

For the period as a whole, there is a great similarity between the two journals. The global proportion of articles making references to cliometric (that is, economics applied to history) writings is 15% for the RHAF and 18% for CHR . However, when the data are spliced into five-year intervals, there seems to be some substitution from traditional economic history to cliometrics in the Francophone journal while the respective shares remain more stable on the Anglophone side. We comment on these findings.