Using RePEc for syllabi, bibliographies and publication lists

July 13, 2008

As highlighted in a recent post, we encourage deep linking in RePEc services. This is particularly useful for reading lists and syllabi. In fact, IDEAS provides simple tools to create such lists on its web site.

The first one allows to create reading lists by providing code that is similar to HTML and includes handles of items listed in RePEc. Each of these items is then automatically matched with other versions, thus allowing to find a free version of a password protected article, or find the latest version of a working paper as published in a journal. Different layouts are possible: one for a course syllabus, one for reading lists.

The second one allows to create a list of publications from a set of authors registered on RePEc. Existing examples include ex-pats from some countries, graduates from programs, winners of prizes, etc. Note that such lists are automatically computed for members of research units or departments. See listing on EDIRC. For other lists, this tools comes handy.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in June 2008

July 3, 2008

June was a surpisingly busy month, especially in terms of content expansion. We have now reached 600,000 works listed on RePEc, and it took only 10 months to add the last 100,000. Traffic was also heavy for the season, reaching 584,843 downloads and 2,803,705 abstract views.

The following institutions joined RePEc with an archive: World Scientific Publishing, Queens College (CUNY), GEFRA, Kobe University, Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW), Université d’Auvergne, Universtät Freiburg, Società Italiana degli Economisti. Finally, here are the thresholds we reached this month:

140,000,000 cumulative abstract views
100,000,000 cumulative abstract views on IDEAS
45,000,000 cumulative abstract views for articles
600,000 listed works
350,000 articles listed
300,000 online articles listed
240,000 working papers listed
180,000 working paper abstracts
150,000 items with references
120,000 article abstracts
20,000 NEP reports

Leave a Comment » | Economics Profession, Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Why hotlinking to a RePEc service makes sense

June 27, 2008

Hotlinking is the practice of linking to a web page deep in a web site, instead of its front page. This practice is discouraged by many news sites, both because they prefer users to browse through the site and because links may become obsolete.

At RePEc, we actually encourage hotlinking. Links in RePEc services are designed to stay current (in principle). Also, instead of linking to a PDF file on a researcher’s web page, which may disappear, abstract pages on EconPapers or IDEAS are much more stable. In addition, these abstract pages may provide links to other versions of the paper. This proves particularly useful if the user does not have access to a password protected article from a commercial publisher, or if the user wishes to know whether the paper has been published. Other links on the abstract page can also be valuable, like those to author profiles, references, citations and related works. Finally, authors always appreciate when paper downloads are counted towards their statistics. Indeed, RePEc can only monitor traffic routed through its services.

Therefore, we encourage hotlinks to RePEc services on blogs, online syllabi, personal web pages, online bibliographies, etc.

4 Comments | RePEc features | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Where are the women?

June 19, 2008

Women have always been underrepresented in Economics. For example, regarding US faculty, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), a subcommittee of the American Economic Association, determines in its latest annual report that women represent 28% of assistant professors, 21% of associate professors and 8% of full professors in PhD granting Economics department. As a whole, they represent 19% of all Economics faculty.

The point of this post is not to complain about the low proportion of women in the profession, or about their dwindling share up the ladder, but about the lack of involvement on women in RePEc. Currently, their share is at 14.5%. It is clearly below the 19% mentioned, although it is slowly increasing (it was 13.6% a year ago and 12.7% two years ago). Why this underrepresentation?

It is of course possible that their a bias in those numbers, because the CSWEP numbers pertain only to the United States and the RePEc Author Service covers the whole world. So, let us analyze the top 1000 economists from Tom Coupé’s list. Of the men, only 22.9% are not registered taking the ranking by publications, and 32.4% with the ranking by citations (which includes quite a few non-economists). For women, the numbers are 37.2% and 44.4%. We see that top female economists are less likely to be signed up with RePEc.

Therefore, encourage women to register at the RePEc Author Service!

PS: You may wonder how these numbers are determined, as gender is not indicated when registering with the RePEc Author Service. It is inferred from first names, using a database of gender likelihood by name. For the more uncertain cases, an exception table was created using additional information, in particular from pictures on personal web pages.

1 Comment | Economics Profession | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Fluctuations in author citation counts

June 11, 2008

Many authors may have rejoiced about the increase in their citation counts in their last monthly notification. At least part of this increase is due to an error that crept in while fixing a citation display issue for authors on IDEAS. This error is now fixed and next month’s mailing will show a substantial decrease in citation counts for some. While I got no complaints this time, I expect some in a few weeks…

In some cases, counts will be even lower than before the error crept in. This is because now extra care is taken not to double count citations to and from different versions of the same works. As always, self-citations are not counted in totals but still displayed on IDEAS.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in May 2008

June 4, 2008

Traffic on RePEc services continues to be high, establishing a record for the third month in a row for abstracts. But tis streak is expected to come to an end, as Summer traffic is typically lower. All in all, we counted 693,457 file downloads and 2,836,840 abstract views.

During the month of May, the following institutions joined RePEc with new archives:
University of Hamburg, Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, CIDE, University College Dublin, Nanyang Technological University, Romanian Journal of Regional Science, University of Central Missouri, University of Luxembourg, Queensland University of Technology.

In terms of thresholds passed, you should notice a few very significant ones:
90,000,000 cumulative abstract views for working papers
20,000,000 cumulative downloads through IDEAS
1,000,000 cumulative downloads through NEP
300,000 abstracts available
180,000 working papers available online
120,000 JEL coded items

Leave a Comment » | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Call for Papers: The Economics of Limited and Open Access Publishing

May 29, 2008

Economic Analysis and Policy (EAP) is a 38 year old journal published by the Economic Society of Australia (Queensland branch) that has just adopted an open access policy. To celebrate this important step, EAP intends to publish in 2009 a special issue on the Economics of publishing, with special reference to different business models, like the commercial, university press, open access and pre-print models. Academic publishing is undergoing a profound transformation that we wish to better understand.

EAP particularly seeks to publish passionate, critical, and controversial articles. It is open to orthodox but also unorthodox approaches.

We expect to publish 5 to 8 articles. They will be peer-reviewed under the guest editorship of Christian Zimmermann (University of Connecticut). Please submit your manuscript in PDF format through the journal’s online submission.

Update: The submission deadline is set for November 1, 2008.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Archives | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

My paper got published, what do I do?

May 20, 2008

A typical situation: An author registered on the RePEc Author Service has a working paper, listed on RePEc in his profile, that got published in a journal. Now that the publisher has provided the bibliographic information about this article to RePEc, the author can add it to his profile. What should he do about the working paper?

In an overwhelming majority of cases, the answer is: nothing! Indeed, most publishers accept that pre-prints, even post-prints, remain on authors´ home pages or institution repositories (what department working paper series are, for example). In case of doubt, see the SHERPA/RoMEO list. Thus, the author should not ask the paper to be removed from wherever it was put up.

Note: removing a paper from an author profile does not remove it from the database. It only makes the system learn that the author is not the author of this particular work. The consequences can be very annoying. For example, it becomes impossible for RePEc to recognize that these are two versions (pre-print and published) of the same work, as they appear to have different authors. Then, someone stumbling on the working paper will not find a link to the published version.

For authors caring about their ranking, there are even more adverse consequences from removing the working paper from the author profile. First, many working paper series have higher impact factors that journals. Second, the authors loose the download statistics of the working paper. Remember, working papers are much more downloaded than articles. And if the article is available only to subscribers, non-subscribers do not have the option of accessing the free working paper version.

And if it is really required that the working paper be removed, ask the RePEc series maintainer to only remove the link to the full text, not the whole record.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

A survey of RePEc services

May 11, 2008

RePEc is just a way to organize bibliographic data. A RePEc service uses that data and makes it usable to the public. As the data is in the public domain, anybody can start such a service and make RePEc even more useful. Here is a list of known RePEc services, listed in alphabetical order.

CitEc

CitEc performs citations analysis on works listed in RePEc and returns citation data to RePEc services. CitEc is managed by Jose Manuel Barrueco Cruz and is hosted by the Technical University of Valencia, Spain.

EconLit

EconLit is a bibliographic database sold by the American Economics Association. It also display select working papers series from RePEc. In exchange, Econlit provides some bibliographic metadata to RePEc and support in encouraging more working paper series to be listed in RePEc.

EconPapers

EconPapers displays all the data collected in RePEc, including author information and links to references. The site can be browsed by series, journals, authors and fields. EconPapers also provides various checks to others services and to archive maintainers (metadata syntax, URL checks, linking different versions of the same work). EconPapers is maintained by Sune Karlsson and hosted by the University of Orebrö, Sweden.

IDEAS

IDEAS displays all the data collected in RePEc, including authors information, references, citations, and rankings. The site can be browsed by series, journals, authors, fields, and institutions, or searched. IDEAS is maintained by Christian Zimmermann and hosted at the University of Connecticut, USA.

Inomics

Inomics is a website that was created by the late Thorsten Wichmann. One feature of Inomics is displaying RePEc data. While the rest on the site is continually maintained by Berlecon staff, the RePEc part still runs unmodified after many years. Inomics is based in Berlin, Germany.

LogEc

LogEc performs statistical analysis for downloads and abstract views on select RePEc services (i.e., those that make the effort to provide relevant data): EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP and Socionet. The results can be called in all sorts of ways. LogEc is maintained by Sune Karlsson and hosted by the University of Orebrö, Sweden.

NEP

NEP (New Economics Papers) disseminates new working papers through field specific email lists. At this writing, 83 mailing lists are available, and they typically send a message once a week. To be listed, a working paper needs to be recent, available online, and selected by an editor aided by an expert system. Subscriptions are free. NEP is lead by Marco Novarese, maintained by Thomas Krichel and hosted by SUNY-Oswego, USA.

RePEc Author Service

The RePEc Author Service allow authors to compile all their works listed in RePEc into one folder. Along with contact information and affiliations, the collected data can then be used by other RePEc services, to enrich the displayed data, generate cross-links or compute rankings. The RePEc Author Service is maintained by Christian Zimmermann and hosted by the University of Connecticut, USA.

Socionet

Socionet is a website in Russian that serves a lot of information about research in social sciences, including RePEc data. It also includes RePEc data in Cyrillic that other services typically do not display. Socionet is maintained by Sergei Parinov and Viktor Lyapounov and hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.

Others

RePEc data is also disseminated through an OAI-PMH portal (OAI=Open Archives Initiative) where it is picked up by numerous other services, including OAIster, Google Scholar and Yahoo Search.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in April 2008

May 2, 2008

As expected RePEc beat traffic records in the past months, with both EconPapers and IDEAS posting records. Over all services, LogEc recorded 749,918 file downloads and 2,815,159 abstract views.

In other news, the RePEc Input Service was inaugurated a few days ago. We also experienced some email trouble as our email server was subject to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. While the attack is still going on, we have found efficient was to deal with it. Finally, the following institutions joined RePEc with new archives: Academy of Economic Studies (Bucharest), Academia Romana, University of Strathclyde, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Wolters Kluwer Health, Robert Schumann Centre, Institute of Development Studies (Brighton), Lebanese Economic Association, Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the EC (IAAEG).

And now the various thresholds we passed last month, with plenty of important ones this time:
30,000,000 cumulated downloads
10,000,000 article downloads
700,000 monthly downloads
475,000 online items
175,000 paper abstracts
100,000 papers announced through NEP
16,000 registered authors
2,000 online chapters
1,600 software components

Leave a Comment » | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

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