RePEc is essentially a large bibliographic database. Thus it needs data about bibliographic items. As RePEc has no employee and can only rely on volunteers, it had to find a way to reduce the cost of data input to a minimum. It succeeded in the sense that this cost is shifted to those that benefit the most from having their publications listed on RePEc: the publishers. We call such publishers “RePEc archive maintainers.” They can be commercial publishers, university presses, economics departments, research centers, central banks, societies or other organizations that have some form of publication relevant to Economics.
This is how RePEc archive maintainers proceed: They maintain sets of flat text files following a particular format called ReDIF. There are different formats for different types of documents. For example, the template describing a working paper would look like this:
Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Hildegrund Muesli
Author-Workplace-Name: University of Upper Elbonia
Author-Name: Adalbrecht Vollkorn
Author-Workplace-Name: Institute for Grandiose Research
Title: The Economics of Gizmos: Grandiose Results
Abstract: Gizmos have become more common with the advent of cybermarkets. This paper explains how banking regulation, demographics and global climate change have increased the demand for gizmos.
Classification-JEL: Z00
Keywords: Location, Location, Location
File-URL: http://www.uelbonia.edu/econ/papers/0803.pdf
Number: 0803
Creation-Date: 2008-02
Handle: RePEc:uel:papers:0803
There are other templates for articles, chapters, books, software components, series and archives. For RePEc-internal uses, people and institutions also have templates, all with unique identifiers (handles) that allow for cross-linking. These templates are then placed on the website or the anonymous ftp site of the publisher, and RePEc services visit them on a regular basis, typically daily, to check for changes. This allows for very fast turn-around times.
Complete instructions on how to proceed to open a RePEc archive can be found here. If your institution is not yet listed among the about 900 participating archives, consider following these instructions.
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I see that Population and Development Review is not on the IDEAS data base. Would the publisher (Population Council) have to take the initiative or can other data bases be used, such as Jstor or NRC?
Jim
Journals are included in RePEc by the publisher. The publisher must either set up a RePEc archive and provide the metadata describing the articles in their titles or provide RePEc with metadata that can be mechanically converted to our metadata format. We recommend that if you are interested in having a specific title in RePEc that you contact the journal’s editor and ask whether the editorial board will raise the issue with the publisher.
Good afternoon gentlemen,
it seems i cannot include my ssrn papers in my author’s list of research pieces. Does it depend from ssrn? Is there any way this could be done? Thanks for your attention
SSRN does not participate in RePEc, unfortunately.
[…] By Christian Zimmermann We inaugurate today the RePEc Input Service. As we detailed recently, bibliographic data is made available to RePEc on the publishers’ own ftp or web servers. […]