The RePEc Blog

On 2009-11-10, the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas took over mutabor, the machine that makes CitEc, from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. The RePEc community is grateful to Fernando Ferrer, who helped running the machine at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. We cheer Rodrigo Aragón Rodríguez who will be helping to maintain the machine at its new location.

CitEc is the citation analysis project within RePEc. At the time of this writing, it has analysed 230.279 documents, finding 5.130.205 references and 2.176.994 citations. The software side of the project is maintained by José Manuel Barrueco Cruz.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is a business historian with a deep interest in the dissemination of research. Quite naturally he became editor of NEP-HIS and quickly, in 2000, took the responsibility for the whole NEP project until 2007. He is still very much involved, still editing NEP-HIS, which is the mailing list with the most subscribers, at now over 5000. Occasionally, he has also edited other NEP reports on an interim basis.

Under Bernardo’s auspices, NEP grew tremendously. First, he made sure that every field of economics and some fields in business are covered by NEP. In principle now, every new working paper in RePEc should be picked up by at least one NEP report and announced by email and RSS. This required a substantial recruitment effort of new volunteer editors, complicated by the fact that new fields needed to be covered. Bernardo also worked hard to increase the subscriber base, not because it would increase revenue (there is none), but because of the network effects that make it more worthwhile to post papers on RePEc, and thus subscribe to NEP, etc.

While Bernardo retired from NEP leadership duties (taken over by Marco Novarese), he is still very active in the RePEc community, both in internal discussion and with NEP-HIS.

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?

The news are filled with reports of financial difficulties and funding is being cut left and right for all sorts of programs. How is RePEc affected? On the revenue side, we are happy to report that it is stable, at zero. On the expense side, we seem to be unchanged, at zero as well. RePEc is completely run by volunteers so that it does not rely on funding and can provide its services for free to everyone.

That does not mean that there are no risks. RePEc services also rely on hardware and hosting services. So far, we have managed to find sponsors for those. We have little slack, though. If a machine were to fail, or a host were to give up a slot, we would have to scramble for solutions. We are therefore always on the lookout for new opportunities. We even have a new project currently looking for a home. If you are interested in any capacity, do not hesitate to contact us!

José Manuel Barrueco Cruz was one of the first volunteers to participate in RePEc, and he is still very active nowadays. As a librarian at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Valencia (Spain), he noticed in 1994 Thomas Krichel’s efforts with WoPEc and volunteered to help him gathering links to online working papers. When the links became too numerous to manage, they devised the system that underlies RePEc nowadays. José wrote the scripts that allowed to gather the metadata from the various publishers and to display the collected data for the now defunct WoPEc and BibEc websites. He also generously adapted these scripts for the launch of IDEAS.

His major endeavor since 2002 is CitEc, the citation analysis of documents indexed by RePEc. As detailed in previous posts, this is no simple undertaking. First, the references need to be properly extracted from documents. Second, the matching process is made more difficult by the many ways in which references are listed. Finally, the data in RePEc is now so large that important computing resources are necessary, something José found at the neighboring Polytechnical University of Valencia. And the evaluation of institutional archives has now become the subject of his doctoral thesis in library science, while he is concurrently working and teaching at the library for social sciences of the University of Valencia.

Beyond his involvement in documenting research in economics, José is also active in two other projects: DoIS (Documents in Information Science) and E-LIS (Eprints in Library and Information Science). No wonder that he was finalist for the European Business Librarian of the Year award in 1999