One of the most actively accessed RePEc series is the Boston College Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive. This was the first RePEc series to list software, rather than working papers, journal articles, books or chapters. It currently contains 1,275 items in a number of programming languages, over 1,000 of which relate to the Stata statistical package. Stata has the unique capability to download user-written components and install them over the web, and its developers have in fact written a ‘ssc’ command that accesses the archive. Users may search the SSC Archive from within Stata or from the web interface of IDEAS or EconPapers.
The series is the 7th most popular series (in terms of total downloads) over the past 12 months, as documented by LogEc for downloads through RePEc services. Downloads of Stata components (“ado-files”), including directly from Stata, are tracked separately, and total over 100,000 per month. A custom perl script is used to translate the RePEc template for each package into the Stata .pkg file format used by web-aware Stata. The availability of a single, reliable site from which user-written routines can be easily downloaded has made the SSC Archive a very important part of the Stata user community.
The RePEc Blog 