RePEc coverage outside of academia

June 29, 2009

RePEc indexes research in Economics, and one usually thinks about publications in journals and pre-prints disseminated by universities through the form of working papers or discussion papers. The fact is that a lot of research is also conducted outside these institutions. Take as an example central banks. Beyond their role of managing the money supply in their respective countries, as well as in some cases operating the payment system and regulating parts of the financial system, they conduct research to facilitate their operations and more generally understand the economy.

Much of this research is also present on RePEc. The following central bank have opened RePEc archives: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, England, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Spain, Turkey, United States (all Federal Reserve Banks). The following participate through an aggregator: Finland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland. And finally, the following supranational institutions have a RePEc archive: Bank for International Settlements, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund. There are plenty of other governmental institutions participating as well, in particular statistical offices, ministries and regulators.

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

The best top level institutions in Economics

June 21, 2009

RePEc rankings are surprisingly popular, despite their experimental status, in fact this is the most read topic on this blog. So to cater to the interest of our users, let us add another ranking… RePEc has been ranking institutions for quite a while now, using the institutions listed in EDIRC. This ranks, say, at the department level, not at the university level. This is detrimental to institutions where economists are scattered in various departments, in particular in departments that are not listed in EDIRC, for example law, political sciences and statistics. A new ranking is now computed that assembles all authors within the top level institution for their affiliation(s), say a university, a government, etc. Current results are here.

The methodology is the following. For affiliations listed in EDIRC, the top level is used. That would typically be a university. For affiliations not listed in EDIRC, the homepage domain of the institution submitted by the author is matched with any institutions listed in EDIRC. If no match is found, it is taken as is. Finally, as usual with multiple affiliations, a weighing scheme is used to distribute the author’s score across all affiliations.

Note a few particularities. All components of the University of London (LSE, Imperial College, etc.) are all merged into one. All subdivisions of a national government are also merged. US Federal Reserve Banks, however, are not merged, as they are top level in their respective states.

6 Comments | RePEc rankings | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc on Facebook

June 13, 2009

Following a comment made in the suggestion box, a Facebook group has been created. Apart from the usual function of such groups, users can discuss a proposed application that would allow to include some information from RePEc in their Facebook profile. If you are both a RePEc and a Facebook user, you are welcome to join.

3 Comments | Use of RePEc data | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in May 2009

June 6, 2009

It seems that every month we have some new big number to announce. This time we have four. First, RePEc has now information about 3/4 million items of research. Second, our email notification service NEP has now sent 500 weekly NEP-ALL reports (the ones containing all new papers). Then, the CitEc project has now managed to extract references from 200,000 items, and thus find citations to 250,000 items within RePEc.

New participants providing bibliographic information about their publications are: Arizona State University (II), Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies, University of Pitesti, Warwick Business School, University of Economics Prague, Technical University of Lisbon, Gestión Joven, Anadolu University, ISCTE, Polish Academy of Sciences, George Washington University (II)

In terms for traffic, LogEc registered 823,795 file downloads and 2,916,764 abstract views. Last month, it was 917,870 respectively 3,149,903. We mention this because these numbers had to be corrected after one week of IDEAS traffic was found missing, but too late for last month’s report. In any case, all statistics are available at LogEc.

Finally, the list of thresholds we have passed during last month is the following:
125000000 abstract views on IDEAS
750000 items listed in RePEc
250000 items cited within RePEc
200000 items with references extracted
500 NEP-ALL reports

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