I was checking whether the ethos of academic economics is consistent with or contrary to a scientific approach. If the top-cited people are writing papers heavily tested against reality (and they do at least a moderately good job matching some parts of reality), then it argues that they are at least science-leaning, not pseudoscience (on average--there may still be pseudosciencey portions that haven't yet been adequately challenged).

Thus, it is a direct test of your claim that economics is a pseudoscience. Of course, anything can be used pseudoscientifically, but that's a different argument--if new-age people talk about the healing properties of quantum energy fields of crystals, you don't blame the physicists.

Whether there is a sneaky in-between category of pseudoscientific political economist--I think there certainly was such a beast in the early 2000s--is something that has to be continually re-evaluated if economics itself has grown up to be more science-like. That requires a more nuanced argument than you make when you assume that economics itself is a pseudoscience. For instance, prior to "evidence-based medicine" you could argue that a lot of medicine was pseudoscientific. Now that evidence-based medicine is the norm, it requires a much more careful argument to pick out some particular practice as actually pseudoscientific. (There are plenty of places where tradition has not yet been adequately analyzed through an evidence-based lens. Also, sometimes the requirement for evidence itself turns into scientism: it wasn't from a study therefore it doesn't work (which is obviously flawed reasoning).)

Anyway, you can also look at funding sources when they're listed in the papers. I'm relatively less bothered by that when the field keeps itself fairly constrained by reality because despite what you say, you actually can't get that far wrong without being transparently sloppy (or flat-out committing fraud) just by manipulating statistics. Not if you understand what's going on, anyway (which, admittedly, a lot of people don't, but there are plenty of experts who can judge).