The best young economists?

March 25, 2009

Who are the best young economists? RePEc publishes all sorts of rankings based on its data, but has so far been missing one that highlights the best young economists. Indeed, they are typically invisible from the general rankings as it takes many years to build up the required body of work and citations to be featured among the top economists.

Unfortunately, authors registering with RePEc do not supply their year of birth or the year they obtained their last graduate degree. However, RePEc has information about the date of most publications, and it is then possible to determine (roughly) when a career started. Here, we do not make the type of publication (article vs. working paper, for example), as the goal is to try to approximate when the economist started being active in research.

Based on this criterion, two groups of economists are selected: those with their first publication, whatever the medium, less than five years ago, and those less than ten years ago. Quite obviously, there is considerably more measurement error compared to that already present in the general ranking, first because of the imperfect measure of the start of the career, second because the body of work is typically much smaller. But we hope people will still find these rankings useful.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Volunteer recognition: Marco Novarese

March 18, 2009

In our continuing series featuring RePEc volunteers, we present today Marco Novarese. He is assistant professor at the faculty of Law, University of Piemonte Orientale (Italy) and he directs the NEP project within RePEc. NEP disseminates new working papers though email and RSS in currently 84 different fields, each staffed by an editor who sorts what is relevant among all new items. Marco edits the NEP report on Cognitive and Behavioural Economics, but more importantly heads the entire project. His responsibility is to solicit and recruit new editors, encourage the creation of new reports (volunteer if your field is not covered) and monitor the project.

Before heading NEP, Marco’s responsibility was to check that the data sent to NEP editors for appraisal is clean and does not contain obvious misfits (papers that are not new, for example). Not having found a volunteer to do this, he is still on the hook. Maybe you can help him out?

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

1000 archives participating in RePEc

March 10, 2009

With last week’s additions, RePEc is now carrying bibliographic data from over 1000 archives. This is a good opportunity to give a reminder how data actually makes it to RePEc. Indeed, there is no staff at RePEc that would be inputing data, this is all provided directly from the publishers. These, be it commercial publishers, Economics department, research centers or central banks, put files at a predetermined address on their web or ftp server, following the Guildford protocol. These files follow a set syntax codified by ReDIF (Research Documents Information Format). The RePEc services then gather this bibliographic data on a regular schedule (typically every night) and display it to the public.

Thus, if you are a publisher and want something listed on RePEc, follow our step-by-step instructions. If you are an author unhappy that some of your works are missing, encourage your publisher(s) to participate. Alternatively have your institutions participate with its working papers (most publishers allow pre-prints or post-prints to be posted) or load your works up at the Munich Personal RePEc Archive.

Update (March 13): We have now also supassed 2500 working paper series…

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in February 2009

March 3, 2009

A short, but busy month considering we were close to beat our monthly traffic records, with 859,562 file downloads and 3,115,704 abstract views. We also continue adding material at a tremendous pace, about 500 items a day and 15 new authors register every day.

The following archives joined RePEc: Cairn.info, Università di Roma Sapienza, University of Nottingham (II), Management and Organization Review, CEFIG Budapest, Latvijas Banka, University of Pisa, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, South Dakota State University.

In terms of thresholds passed, we have the following:
25,000,000 downloads through IDEAS
600,000 items available online
140,000 items with JEL codes
900 journals

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann