Authors can register on the RePEc Author Service to create an online profile of their works and obtain monthly various statistics and newly found citations for their works. This service was introduced in its current form in 2004, and has just seen the 20,000th author register (in addition to over 6000 non-authors). While RePEc and the RePEc Author Service are not formally associations, we can still claim to be larger than the largest of all societies in Economics, the American Economic Association having about 18,000 members.
We are frequently asked how much of the profession we cover. This is very difficult to determine. Using the method discussed when we reached 15,000 authors, we can only say that we have currently a coverage between 41% and 80% of the profession.
Note that the RePEc Author Service is only a data collection service, as it obtains data from authors about what they wrote (among items listed in RePEc), their contact details and their affiliations. It solicits also help from them in identifying some citations. It is then the job of other services to do something with the collected data. Thus EconPapers and IDEAS display author profiles, EDIRC lists authors by affiliation, LogEc displays their download statistics and CitEc uses the collected citation data. In addition, rankings of authors and institutions can be computed.
The RePEc Blog 