Different people experience RePEc through its different uses, sometimes without being aware of its other uses. The purpose of this post is to highlight the use of RePEc services for bibliographic searches.
Currently, there are three different websites that offer bibliographic searches based on the data collected by RePEc: EconPapers, IDEAS and EconomistsOnline. Why use them instead of simply Google or Google Scholar? First, RePEc services allow fielded search: given the structure of the underlying metadata, it is possible to separate search results by authors, topical area, date, publication type and other attributes. EconomistOnline goes here the furthest, by allowing to narrow result sets successively according to various criteria. Second, the database and the search engines are updated as soon as publishers post new material, thus search results always reflect current holdings. Finally, as RePEc is not a spider, rather a catalog indexed directly by publishers, contents are known to be related to research in Economics. Thus, there are no irrelevant search results.
In addition, there are plug-ins available for most popular browsers both EconPapers and IDEAS. They allow to search RePEc directly from the search bar in a browser.
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