The RePEc Blog

It seems that every month we have some new big number to announce. This time we have four. First, RePEc has now information about 3/4 million items of research. Second, our email notification service NEP has now sent 500 weekly NEP-ALL reports (the ones containing all new papers). Then, the CitEc project has now managed to extract references from 200,000 items, and thus find citations to 250,000 items within RePEc.

New participants providing bibliographic information about their publications are: Arizona State University (II), Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies, University of Pitesti, Warwick Business School, University of Economics Prague, Technical University of Lisbon, Gestión Joven, Anadolu University, ISCTE, Polish Academy of Sciences, George Washington University (II)

In terms for traffic, LogEc registered 823,795 file downloads and 2,916,764 abstract views. Last month, it was 917,870 respectively 3,149,903. We mention this because these numbers had to be corrected after one week of IDEAS traffic was found missing, but too late for last month’s report. In any case, all statistics are available at LogEc.

Finally, the list of thresholds we have passed during last month is the following:
125000000 abstract views on IDEAS
750000 items listed in RePEc
250000 items cited within RePEc
200000 items with references extracted
500 NEP-ALL reports

One of the advantages of RePEc is the extremely rapid update cycle. Once a paper has been added to a RePEc archive, RePEc services like EconPapers and IDEAS usually pick it up and list it within 24 hours. The paper is also disseminated through the NEP email notification service within two weeks. The longer delay comes from the weekly frequency of the emails, the various checks that are performed before submitting the paper to editors and the availability of editors. Papers are also available the next day for authors to claim into their profile on the RePEc Author Service. However, they may not get notified about this until it is their turn in the “automatic search” that rotates through all registered people, currently 27,000. A full cycle there takes close to three months. Indeed, such searches impose quite a burden on the machine, and they yield most of the time no result. When they know a new paper is up, we encourage authors to log in and do a “manual search”.

Other aspects take longer. Citation extraction can take several weeks, as the data about the paper needs to be gathered, analyzed and then compared with exiting material in the database. And once the results are returned to RePEc services, those may take a while, too. While EconPapers tries to add the new data within a day at all the right spots (cited papers, citing paper), IDEAS prefers to work on a rolling basis, refreshing paper pages every 30 days (or sooner if a change was done in the originating RePEc archive). Indeed, IDEAS also needs to adjust author citation pages, recompute statistics for authors and recalculate impact factors. As authors are usually quite impatient, the refresh cycle for authors is 18 days, unless they just modified their profile.

Download and abstract views statistics on LogEc are refreshed once a month, within the first days. A higher frequency is not possible due to the many checks those statistics go through, some of them being performed manually. For the same reason, rankings are released only once a month, except for the impact factors on series and journals, as well as the citation rankings for individual items, which are recomputed along the refresh cycle mentioned above for IDEAS.

And there are many other updates that can take a few days and the data bounces from one service to the other. For example, EDIRC houses data about institutions, and any update there will be reflected in author affiliations as their profiles get refreshed, which can take some wait. And EDIRC gets data about affiliated people from the RePEc Author Service, which can take a pass or two before being visible on the web. Or, information about papers disseminated through NEP are given to RePEc services. IDEAS, for example, uses this to categorize authors into topical fields.

RePEc is not a centralized service. It has servers, data gatherers, analyzers and users disseminated around the globe. They exchange data, but not in real time. Consider that there are over 1000 archives, and that RePEc services are disseminated over a dozen different machines. Still, update time are much, much faster than what one would have expected from any bibliographic service before RePEc came into existence.

The big news of the month is that the RePEc Author Service surpassed 20,000 registered authors. When this service started, it was difficult to imagine that it would grow so big, and it continues to grow with about ten new registrants a day.

RePEc also grows with the addition of new participating archives, the following for last month: Monash University, Deakin University, Bank of Lithuania, Universidad Nacional de Salta, Università della Calabria, Rivista di Politica Economica, Institut d’Estudis Regionals i Metropolitans de Barcelona, Italian Department of the Treasury, Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia, Advances in Management. With the addition of Lithuania, There are now RePEc archives in 67 countries.

Traffic on our websites was lighter than expected, but still impressive numbers with 756,200 file downloads and 2,600,732 abstract views. This brings us to the thresholds we passed last month:

400,000 listed abstracts
400,000 items listed in author profiles
120,000 papers with JEL codes
50,000 articles with extracted references
20,000 registered authors
5,000 listed chapters
3,000 listed books