Economics' position in the hierarchy of sciences (hard vs soft) As a student of Economics, I often listen to the claim that Economics is a &quot;soft science&quot; and that its results may not be too reliable etc. The explanations are often based on personal opinion.
I have newly come to know that rigorous academic literature exists that uses bibliographic and other data to rank sciences based on their &quot;hardness&quot;, following Comte's idea of a hierarchy of sciences.
Wikipedia cited this as an empirical investigation of the hierarchy of sciences--
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3694152/
While I find this analysis useful, it does not specifically tell us where Economics lies in the hierarchy (it does find evidence of a hierarchy based on 5/6 factors like clusters in reference graphs, length of paper etc). In most of the results, it clubs all of the social sciences together. In one of the charts, it has a category &quot;Economics and Business&quot;, which appears to be near the other social sciences in the hierarchy. But I am not sure where Economics alone (not clubbed with business or other social sciences) will stand in the hierarchy.
Another paper tries to specifically find Psychology's place in the hierarchy--
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.59
I wanted to know, if there are any such studies that specifically tell us about where Economics stands in the hierarchy-- whether it is closer to the natural sciences or the social sciences?
There is actually no clear cut consensus on where Economics belongs (although it is fair to say most would likely put it into category of social science). Some authors consider it to be science, some social science, some even moral science, and some even argue it should have its own category.  A good paper that tries to answer this question for economics is  Hudson (2017).
According to the author:

Is economics a science or a social science? Arguments have been made for both orientations, i.e. that economics is a social science (Frey 1999), a science (Frey 1999) and even a moral science (Schabas 2009). In terms of sciences it has been linked with physics, with many physicists doubling as, or transforming into, economists and a subpart of physics, econophysics, specifically evolving which deals with economics (Stanley et al. 1999). There are also links with biology (Marshall 1920; Daly 1968). Frey (1999) argues economics is a social science as it is part of those sciences which deal with actual problems of society, i.e. it is the subject matter which makes it a social science. However, he also points out that in practice economists tend to fill the journals with axioms, lemmas and proofs, i.e. they adopt what they perceive as a scientific, and particularly a mathematical, methodology. Mayer (1980) argues that economists act as though economics is a hard science and this is reflected by their sophisticated use of mathematics. However, he then goes on to argue that econometrics is not sufficiently advanced to enable us to test theories as a hard scientist would.

The literature review above is good place to find out the different views on what economics is. In addition the paper itself is not just a literature review but also itself tries to answer the question by examining how similar economics is to other fields. Hudson (2017) further concludes:

With respect to the question posed in the title of this paper, our view, in part informed by these results, is that the subject matter of economics places it clearly as a social science, but many in the discipline act as if it were a science. Economics has gradually developed into an interdisciplinary subject that uses scientific methods, for example setting out and formally testing hypotheses, and particularly a mathematical approach, to solve social science problems. This dual aspect may explain why it fails to fit neatly with either as in fact it combines elements of both. It is a social science pursued with more quantitative rigour than much of the rest of the social sciences. This emphasis on technique then pushes economics and economists away from the other social sciences and in some sub-disciplines towards maths. Placing economics as a science, emphasises technique above subject matter. But there is then a danger that technique becomes an end in its own right, rather than a means to an end, i.e. a vehicle which allows a more refined analysis of economic issues which have wider relevance. Often, for example when developing a new econometric technique which subsequently becomes widely used, this is justified. But sometimes this is not the case, which helps explain the relative isolation of the discipline as noted earlier. This does not mean that economists should abandon their quantitative focus, but that they should always strive to ensure that their work contributes, directly or indirectly, to an understanding of a real world issue. This is consistent with Frey’s (1999) observation that economics is part of those sciences which deal with actual problems of society, but that most economists attempt to imitate the sciences and that economics can be regarded as a branch of applied mathematics. It is also consistent with the view that that economics, particularly neoclassical economics, is the most mathematical of the social sciences (Porter 1996).

However, I would not take the above conclusion immediately at face value (author also cautions against that) since the cluster analysis done there could not take into account everything what you would ideally want to and it focused only on research in one country (UK). As you can see since this is still being debated and articles about this published in 2017 this is still not completely settled question (although to be fair most would likely classify it as a social science). Also, as noted in the excerpts above the issue is that economics is quite close to the border between social and hard sciences (some authors say it is social science that acts like hard science or draw parallels with biology) making it difficult to classify.

PS: Actually the Comte's 19th century idea of 'hierarchy of the sciences' is problematic in itself.  The problem is that a field on its own cannot be neatly put into such hierarchy because it consists of many sub-fields that are heterogenous. For example, when it comes to fields like game theory economics can run lab experiments while in astrophysics researchers have to rely almost solely on observational data.
Consequently, once you break fields into sub-fields you will find that subfields from various fields can be on top of the hierarchy while other subfields from the same fields can end up at the bottom.