A few new features on RePEc services

August 30, 2010

RePEc services display the data collected through RePEc to end-users, be it through the web or email. These services constantly improve with new features. We recently reported about some that users may have overlooked. Here are some new ones:

  • On Econpapers, abstract pages now include a “share” button, which allows to easily share or save the page with hundreds or other services.
  • There are now RSS feeds for new citations, for specific articles, papers, series and journals. EconPapers and IDEAS provide links on their pages to the feeds. There are no feeds for authors, as they have been receiving this information for years through email (if registered).
  • A big part of RePEc is driven by user submissions, and here is a nice example. A script that allows to parse NEP reports, downloads the pdf files and put references in a BibTeX file.
  • Another user contribution, not new but I forgot it last time: RePEcfb, a Facebook application that allows to displays your latest works in your profile.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in July 2010

August 6, 2010

Over the last month, RePEc has reached major landmarks: 50 million file downloads, 25,000 registered authors and 1,200 participating archives. Monthly traffic numbers are down, with 595,637 file downloads and 1,875,579 abstract views, in part reflecting a further tightening of the eligibility criteria.

In July, the following institutions joined RePEc with a new archive: Frankfurt School of Management and Finance, Banco de Portugal, Inderscience Enterprises, Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Research Centre for Social Sciences (India), New Economic Association (Russia), Universidad de Valencia (II), and Universität Jena (III).

Finally, the complete list of thresholds reached during the month is:
50,000,000 cumulative downloads
12,500 listed book chapters
12,500 on-line book chapters
1,200 participating archives

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Improved usage statistics for RePEc

August 6, 2010

Usage statistics for RePEc services are collected by LogEc. Producing meaningful statistics for accesses to web servers is a difficult task, especially so since we are merging data from several different sites. Rather than just counting the number of times a page or file is accessed (by a human or a piece of software indexing the web) the goal is to get as close as possible to a measure of the number of people showing an interest in a paper by reading the abstract page or downloading the full text file.

We have always been applying very strict criteria for what should be counted as a download or abstract view but over time it has become clear that the simple filtering for robots and removal of double clicks is not enough. Many new practices has developed on the web, some for a good purpose, some for a more questionable purpose. There are spam-bots, referer spamming (a stupid idea if there ever was one), anti-malware software that checks links on a webpage and warn users about dangerous links and much, much more that should not be counted. And, yes, there appears to be the occasional attempt to manipulate the statistics.

Starting from July 2010 we apply an additional set of heuristics to filter out these accesses. In conjunction with this we have also recalculated the statistics going back to January 2008. The overall effect is relatively small but there are substantial reductions in the number of accesses for a small number of papers.

More information at LogEc.

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Posted by Sune Karlsson

RePEc Author Service reaches major mark

August 4, 2010

The RePEc Author Service has just welcomed the 25,000th author! This service allows economists to build an online profile with all the works they have authored and that are listed in RePEc. A part from having this profile displayed and linked to from individual works on RePEc services like EconPapers and IDEAS, this allows authors to obtain monthly statistics about the popularity of their works, along with new citations discovered by the CitEc project. Collected data is also used to computed various rankings. Note that the 25,000 count only includes registered people who have at least one work listed in the profile. There are about 7,000 other registrations with empty profiles from people who have either overlooked this feature or not yet published some works. A listing of all registered authors is available on EconPapers and IDEAS.

RePEc currently lists 940,000 works from close to 3000 working paper series and 1150 journals, among others, contributed by over 1200 archives. It has become the standard bibliographic database in Economics, with RePEc services recording the 50 millionth download during July 2010. All RePEc activities are driven by volunteers as RePEc is not funded.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann