The RePEc Blog

Summer is when most academics move to new affiliations or responsibilities. It is thus a good time to detail what needs to be done for RePEc data to remain accurate. There are close to 30’000 contact details listed in RePEc, yet only 466 have expired email addresses. You can help keeping this list short.

Registered authors

If your email address changes, log in at the RePEc Author Service with your old address, then click on “Contact details” to amend your email address and any other contact details. Note: do not create a new account with your new email address. This would create a duplicate, and then links to and from your profile would disappear once the old account is deleted. Remember also to amend your affiliation(s) if necessary.

Note that starting next month, authors with obsolete email addresses will not count towards their affiliation’s ranking. This is under the assumption that if the email address is not valid anymore, it must be because they have moved.

RePEc archive and series maintainers

If your email address is changing, or if there is a new person in charge, amend your series and/or archive templates. These are the *seri.rdf and *arch.rdf files in the root of your archive. There is no need to email us, as we extract from your templates the addresses for the monthly emails. However, if your RePEc archive moves to a new location, we obviously need to know about it.

Editors

Editor data is provided at two locations: by the RePEc Author Service and by the relevant publishers. In the first case, an email address change is handled as for a registered author. If you are not an editor anymore (and your editorship is listed in your RePEc profile), you can remove this by logging in at the RePEc Author Service: click on “Research” then “identified”, check your old journal, and approve the removal. To add a journal you now edit to your RePEc profile, either look at the suggested research items (if your publisher put in your name in the RePEc data), or do a manual search with the journal title.

Your publisher may also provide directly your name and your email address to RePEc. Your can see this on the listing of your journal on EconPapers or IDEAS. There you see also a technical contact. This is where you need to email to request a change in the listing.

Following a comment made in the suggestion box, a Facebook group has been created. Apart from the usual function of such groups, users can discuss a proposed application that would allow to include some information from RePEc in their Facebook profile. If you are both a RePEc and a Facebook user, you are welcome to join.

The Economics Search Engine (ESE) is a subset of the Google search engine that restricts its searches to 23,000 economics web sites. It is an outgrowth of Resources for Economists on the Internet (RFE) which lists and describes items for economists. Today many users prefer to use search engines to find resources of interest, so ESE was developed with the assistance of Hal Varian and Othar Hansson, both of Google. ESE not only searches web sites listed in RFE, but also web sites from RePEc Author Services (over 19,000 economists have registered) and Economics Departments, Institutes and Research Centers in the World (EDIRC), which lists more than 11,000 such sites. Thus, by searching at ESE, a user interested in an economic topic is searching over a substantial fraction of the web devoted to economic issues.

ESE is implemented with a Google Custom Search Engine, which enables users to set up a site that restricts a Google search to a user-selected set of sites. It takes some work to set up one as large as ESE, but smaller ones are quite straightforward and doubtless many would benefit from setting one up for their own needs. As with many Google services, it is currently in beta test-mode, so the results might be problematic at times.

To make ESE particularly easy to use, it includes a “Search Plugin” for Internet Explorer 7.0 or FireFox 2.0 and 3.0 users. This allows you to initiate searches directly from a search box in your browser; thus you don’t even need to visit ESE directly. You should be offered one for ESE when you check your search plugins when you’re at the ESE web site.