Volunteer recognition: Christopher Baum

September 24, 2008

Christopher (Kit) Baum is Associate Professor of Economics at Boston College and one of the early volunteers in RePEc, gradually taking important responsibilities. He opened at Boston College one of the first RePEc archives, first with the department’s working papers, soon complemented by a large collection of Stata routines. Once commercial publishers started to get interested in having their publications indexed on RePEc, he took the initiative to negotiate with several of them data transfer protocols, many of which he still maintains and hosts. He is also the person answering to the central RePEc email, which in particular corresponds with maintainers of new RePEc archives. He is also the administrator of the RePEc home page and of this blog.

Quite obviously, Kit has become an essential, if not overburdened part of the RePEc team. Without him, RePEc would not have grown, both in the number of archives and also in terms of the coverage of the large commercial archives. He is also very active and influential in the internal discussions among RePEc volunteers, where policy questions are argued and emergencies are resolved.

Kit is an atypical volunteer in RePEc in that he does so much. There are many other opportunities for volunteers to get involved in RePEc, large and small. Just ask or propose.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc as a bibliographic tool

September 14, 2008

RePEc is a scheme to collect bibliographic information about publication and pre-publications in Economics. Publishers provide all the relevant information, which is then displayed in various ways by RePEc services. This allows users to have access to this data. While it is useful to find items of research while browsing or searching through these services, it is even better when one can upload the relevant bibliographic data directly into one’s bibliographic tool.

Every abstract page on IDEAS has links that allow to download such bibliographic information in various formats: as a HTML citation, a plain text citation, the BibTeX entry familiar to LaTeX users, the RIS format used in various software like EndNote, and the ReDIF format used by RePEc. For registered authors, it is also possible to obtain these records for all their publications in one download. If other formats are used in the research community, they can be provided as well. Just ask.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in August 2008

September 4, 2008

What is new at RePEc? We have introduced RSS feeds for our NEP mailing lists, now giving an alternative to the emails for the dissemination of new working papers. Econlit has opened a RePEc archive collecting bibliographic information about some of the top US working papers series that were not yet listed on RePEc. While traffic was low, as usual for Summer, with 575,686 file downloads and 2,316,727 abstract views, we got a steady stream of authors registering, about 10 a day.

The new archives who joined RePEc were: Institute of Agricultural Economics (Romania), University of Waterloo, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, Economic Statistics e-Center, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Economic and Social Review, University College Dublin, Suffolk University, Centro de Estudios de las Finanzas Públicas, Econlit.

Finally, RePEc passed the following thresholds:
500,000 cumulative book abstract views
400,000 cumulative abstract views at Socionet
190,000 online workig papers
90,000 cited working papers
40,000 articles with references
1,500 books listed

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann