The RePEc Blog

There was quite a bit of movement with NEP reports: some editorships changed, one report was split in two (NEP-URE Urban and Real Estate Economics into NEP-HRE Housing and Real Estate and NEP-UEP Urban Economics and Policy) and a few new reports got added: NEP-MID Minorities Research (Ethnic, LGBTQ+, Disabilities), NEP-MIN Mining, and NEP-PBC Prices and Business cycles.

A few new publishers joined RePEc with their archives: IDEAGOV, Journal of Applied Technology and Innovation (JATI), Electronic Journal of Business and Management (EJBM), Yaroslavl State Technical University, Plataforma de Acción, Gestión e Investigación Social, South American Publishing. We counted 374,617 file dwnloads and 4,730,910 abstract views, with the caveat that the latter statistic is not reliable. No milestone to report this month.

This post is unusually late, in large part because we tried for a long time fixing the statistics for abstract views, whose quality has continued to deteriorate markedly due to AI robot traffic. It does not appear to be something that we can fix, but we will continue providing the data with a disclaimer. Full-text download statistics are believable, for the moment.

Thus, we counted 373,807 file downloads and 12,167,153 abstract views in January 2026. The latter is of course a (doubtful) record. We welcomed six new RePEc archives: Romanian Academic Society of Administrative Sciences, George Brown Press, Management and Business, Berger Science Press, Innovation and Sustainability, and ijcsacademia.com. And we reached the following milestones:

200,000 NEP reports issued
750 blogs with RePEc links indexed on EconAcademics.org

RePEc services continue to see increases in traffic that we find hard to believe, with 371,613 file downloads and 6,441,286 abstract views in December 2025. But more on that below. We welcomed a few new RePEc archives over that month: Lutsk National Technical University, International Emerging Scholars Society (IESS), EconSciences Library, University of Linz (II).

Now regarding last year as a whole. Two points marked the year: First, many of our sites are getting rewritten from scratch, an initiative that is going to be completed in a few months. Second, we have struggled with AI bots, initially when they overwhelmed our servers with requests as they were trying to collect our information, and then they started generating traffic that became difficult to distinguish from human traffic, which messes with our statistics. More details are provided in a recently updated, separate blog post.

Of course, RePEc continues to grow, thanks to 48 new RePEc archives and our existing publication contributors, over 2000 of them. Some highlights: 220 new working paper series, 70,000 new working papers, 260 new journals, 260,000 new journal articles, 56,000 new book chapters, 7,000 new books, 200 new software components, and 2,600 new registered authors, with all authors adding 108,000 works to their profiles. References were extracted from 175,000 new documents, 4,200 NEP reports were issued, and users made 19,000 amendments to the RePEc Genealogy. Finally, 29,000,000 abstracts were viewed on the reporting websites, who facilitated 4,200,000 document downloads.

For 2026, we expect to conclude the code rewrite and then start again with introducing new features. We will for sure have to deal with artificial intelligence, at least as much as last year, mostly as a nuisance. And we look forward to continue serving the economics profession with free services.

The issue we reported last month with unusual traffic on our web pages has gotten worse. As a consequence we will stop including abstract views as a metric for the aggregate ranking of authors and institutions, unless there is a dramatic return to normal. After our vetting, we counted 446,685 file downloads and 4,237,805 abstract views, a new record for the latter.

In addition, we welcomed to RePEc a few new participating archives: the Russian Academy of Entrepreneurship and the Linz Institute for Transformative Change. They contributed to a large increase in indexed content, about 85,000 new items. Finally, here are some milestones we reached during the last month:

600,000,000 cumulative abstract views
450,000,000 cumulative abstract views on IDEAS
3,500,000 journal articles available for download
300,000 indexed book chapters
70,000 indexed books

This past month was unusual because both IDEAS and EconPapers saw a doubling of their traffic compared to the previous month. We expose in a separate blog post why one could have doubts that this is really a doubling of web traffic by humans. In any case, after extensive vetting, we came to 426,544 file downloads and 3,543,137 abstract views over this month.

We also continue to add new particiapting archives at a good clip. Five new ones in October: European Commission, Directorate for Research and Innovation; SciFormat Publishing; Indonesian Treasury; Pioneer Academic Publishing; Brilliance Publishing. Finally, we reached the following milestones:

1,500,000 articles from which references have been extracted

This post has three updates

Over the past year, various RePEc services have been struggling with issues stemming from artificial intelligence robots (AI bots), and this post is a short summary of what happening and where we stand now.

About one year ago, RePEc services started noticing a marked increase in traffic by robots. We are used to search engine robots that scour our sites. They are welcome, first because they make our contents discoverable on search platforms, second because they behave well, that is, they obey the voluntary Robots Exclusion Protocol. This protocol allows webmasters to set boundaries of where robots can and cannot go, and at what frequency.

The new traffic was not obeying that protocol. It was also massive and kept inventing new ways of avoiding being blocked. These are AI bots that are looking for material to learn from, and RePEc material is very interesting to them. As for search bots, we do not have a problem with them as long as they behave well, after all our mission is to enhance the dissemination of economic research. But when they start having an impact on our human users, we have a problem.

EconPapers started getting so much traffic that it was bringing down the campus network, and it had to be shut down for a week. IDEAS search was getting hit so hard that it was not functional. After a months-long cat-and-mouse game, some search features had to be removed for humans to be able to discover the economic literature again. CitEc has also been under pressure at various times. After much optimization, we are now in a state where we can serve appropriately human users.

RePEc is not unique in facing these issues. Research libraries and digital archives all over the world have faced the same issues. In the end, they often were forced to implement costly protective measures to keep the robots at bay and still serve humans. It is now routine to have to pass a test before accessing content.

RePEc does not have the means of acquiring such protection and, as mentioned, we are OK with material being discoverable. We are thus currently in a situation where the sites are still openly accessible, but some features are disabled. And new disruptions may happen.

All this robotic traffic also has had the consequence that computing usage statistics has become much more challenging. Most AI bots do not identify themselves. Worse, they look for ways to hide themselves by masquerading as human users. We leverage those usage statistics on the LogEc site and for various statistics and rankings, so it is important that we get them right. We have spent more and more effort to clean the data, to the point that in September 2025, more than 99.5% of the traffic on IDEAS was thrown out. In addition to identifying robots, we also look automatically and then manually at all outliers, typically finding a couple hundred highly suspicious cases each month.

For October 2025 though, we have not been as successful. Traffic on IDEAS and EconPapers is double the previous month after vetting. We think this is suspicious. We do find a noticeable increase in referral traffic from AI sites, indicating that they have links to our sites and that people follow them. We are obviously happy about that. But this cannot justify a doubling, even if strangely several AI sites decided to hide those referrals as our tests revealed. Note that Google Analytics, which is used for IDEAS and is supposed to filter out robots, also finds a doubling of traffic.

As far as we can tell, this is not benefiting anything in particular: We have again vetted outliers. Thus comparisons between items, series, journals, or authors within a month are still valid. Comparisons from one month to the other may not, though. Time will tell whether this is a one-time problem.

2025-12-08 Update

The problems got worse with analysis of November 2025 traffic. While October had twice the expected abstracts views after vetting, November is close to thrice. We do notice a continuous, but not this abrupt, increase of identified traffic coming from users of AI tools. However, we find it hard to believe that it would rival Google and Google Scholar as a source of traffic. Thus, we believe we still have the problem of properly differentiating human traffic from robotic traffic from AI.

Unless there is a dramatic reversal for the December traffic analysis, we will drop abstract views from the list of criteria used for the author and institution rankings, as a consequence of our lack of confidence in those numbers. The numbers will still be reported, though.

2026-01-06 Update

Things have not improved, in fact they got even worse. We now have over four times the numbers we would have expected for December. If this burst is really coming from humans using links in AI tools, this would mean that this kind of use has vastly overtaken the use of search engines, including Google Scholar. We find this difficult to believe, especially as this has happened within three months.

As a consequence, and as announced, the statistics about abstract views will be dropped from the criteria used for the aggregate RePEc rankings. The numbers will still be reported.

2026-02-16 Update

Things has gotten even worse, with twice the “abstract views” compared to last month. At this point there is no hope we can fix the issues, we threw all the filters we could at the data. We will continue providing the data on abstract views, with a disclaimer. Full-text downloads appear to be OK, for the moment.

In September 2025, we counted 357,043 file downloads and 1,774,078 abstract views from the three RePEc services that share traffic data (EconPapers, IDEAS, and NEP). This does not take into account the massive robotic traffic, mainly from AI robots, that now hits our servers. For example, IDEAS served over 400 million web pages in that month, meaning that less than 0.5% of the traffic was considered human.
In other news, we have a new NEP report, NEP-IAF (International Activities of Firms). We got a good crop of new archives participating in RePEc (11!): Centre for Productivity and Sustainability Analysis, Pinnacle Academic Press, Synergy University, AG Editor, International Journal of Scientific Research and Modern Technology, Universitas Airlangga, Science-Tech Enterprise Alliance, International Journal of Politics & Social Sciences Review, Paradigm Academic Press, Global Talent Fund, Analysis Data (Indonesia). Finally, we hit the following milestone:
72,000 registered authors

Some of the RePEc sites “enjoyed” record traffic over the past month, but with the recent changes to the sites, the impact of those robots was minimal on human users. We hope the infrastructure is now good enough for some time so that we can concentrate on serving the profession.

Over the last month we welcome a coupl of new RePEc archives: Virginia Tech and Ekonomi Maliye İşletme Dergisi. We counted, after eliminating all these robots, 282,247 file downloads and 1,709,780 abstract views. And we reached the following milestones:

25’000 people listed in the RePEc Genealogy

The rewrite of RePEc sites continues, with all public-accessible scripts for IDEAS now completed. One positive impact has been the more efficient handling of pesky robots that sometimes made some features of IDEAS inaccessible. The RePEc Input Service has also been relaunched. In terms of traffic, we counted 295,502 file downloads and 1,688,291 abstract views on EconPapers, IDEAS and NEP. We welcomed a few new RePEc archives: Tecnológico de Monterrey, EU Tax Observatory, Central Bank of Costa Rica. Finally, no major milestones have been reached this month.