The RePEc Blog

Given that RePEc has no revenue, it relies on the goodwill of volunteers to run. But this work is not possible without support from some sponsors that are will share some resources for this good cause. Here is an attempt to acknowledge these sponsors.

• Boston College: hosting of the RePEc home page, the RePEc blog and the metadata for a number of commercial and noncommercial publishers
• College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Connecticut: hosting of IDEAS, EDIRC and the RePEc Author Service
• German National Library of Economics (ZBW): OAI gateway and backup
• Thomas Krichel: mailing lists and backup
• University of Munich Library: hardware and hosting for the Munich Personal RePEc Archive
• University of Orebrö: hardware and hosting of EconPapers and LogEc
• State University of New York, Oswego: hosting of NEP
• Department of Information Systems and Computation, Polytechnical University of Valencia: hardware for the citation analysis (CitEc)
• Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, Russian Academy of Science: hardware and hosting of Socionet
• Society for Economic Dynamics: hardware for IDEAS and EDIRC

Past sponsors included: Hitotsubashi University, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), University of Manchester Computing Centre (MIDAS), Open Society Institute, Université du Québec à Montréal, Stockholm School of Economics.

This posts details how RePEc can be and has been useful in detecting cheating, and how RePEc is dealing with this unfortunate phenomenon.

Plagiarism by authors

RePEc facilitates the availability of research and thus makes it available to would be plagiarists, but RePEc also facilitates the detection of such plagiarism, either directly through RePEc services like EconPapers and IDEAS, or indirectly as other services like Google or Yahoo use RePEc to populate their search engines. While it is not part of its mission, RePEc has on occasion been assisting plagiarized authors to obtain redress, resulting in at least one dismissal from graduate school among the several caught authors.

Plagiarism by publishers

Yes, publishers can also plagiarize, namely by publishing without authorization from authors. Quite obviously, RePEc is tailor-made for detecting such abuse. Unfortunately, there is little that RePEc can do to punish such publishers, except unlisting them. This has happened so far for one publisher, and another one is currently on probation.

Manipulating author profiles

Given that RePEc provides author rankings, there are incentive to inflate one’s résumé with works of others. The logs of the RePEc Author Service are monitored on a regular basis. Any inappropriate claim is then flagged, and the misbehaving author may face a warning or even an exclusion, depending on circumstances. Honest mistakes may happen, but willful manipulation is not tolerated.

Manipulating statistics

Another way to improve rankings is to inflate download ans abstract views statistics. Fortunately, LogEc uses a series of filters, among others removing multiple downloads from the same IP address clusters, looks for various suspicious download patterns as well as a visual audit. Suspicious activity leads usually to the reset the relevant statistics to zero with a warning, an exclusion being the the consequence for a repeat offender. So far, one author has been excluded and several warned.

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.