Given the increased interest in the various RePEc rankings, as well as thanks to comments made by users, I have made various adjustments over the last months. Some are barely perceptible, while some give some new features. Here is a short list.
- Aggregate ranking for series and journals
- Thanks to popular demand, there is now a ranking that aggregates the four impact factors, the h-index, download counts and abstract views. This ranking is available for journals, working paper series and all series.
- Linked series
- By linked series, I mean the situation where a series ceased to exist and continues under a new name. This happens in particular for journals that switch publishers, or journals that merge. Various statistics are now merged for ranking purposes. Thus, there is now a unique impact factor for the various series or journals. This was more complex to pursue for the h-index, and obviously all affected series gained from that. However, this increased the scope of self-citations that could be removed for the impact factor calculations.
Note to RePEc archive maintainers: you can link your series or journals to others by adding a new field in your series templates, Followup: or Successor:, followed by the handle of the other series.
- Expanded listings
- Following a poll a few months ago, the portion of the rankings that is public has been expanded. This will be visible with the ranking released early next month. The ranking of authors and institutions within countries or US states passes from the top 20% to the top 25%, within fields from the top 5% to 10%. The big ones, the top 5% authors and institutions still includes the top 5% in much detail, but now also the next 5% in five 1% “bins.”
- US Economics departments
- While there is already a ranking of Economics departments, one of the most frequent requests is to have one specifically for the United States. There will be one starting with next month’s update. Link.
- Lost authors
- We sometimes lose track of some authors when their monthly messages bounce back. Typically this is because they have moved or died. In both cases, they should not be counting towards the ranking of the institutions they are affiliated with. For a few months now, they have not. By the way, you can help rectify their status or their address by alerting us. The list of lost authors is here. See also the known deceased authors.
- Peer authors
- Registered authors receive every month an email with an analysis of their rankings. This now also includes a list of about 20 peers that are similarly ranked.
- Errata
- There is no reason an erratum or a correction should count as an additional publication for an author. We now try to drop them from ranking considerations and also to link them to the original article.
Posted by Christian Zimmermann 
The RePEc Blog 
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