IDEAS now has a fantasy league

October 28, 2013

Following a successful beta testing, a fantasy league is now live on IDEAS. It all started with an April Fool’s post on this blog that many found to be a great idea. We will see now whether this is true.

As we do not have a publishing season, and publishing is very slow in economics, the rules had to be adapted from the standard fantasy leagues in other “sports.” They may need to be amended in the future, but players will be alerted well ahead of any changes. And if you are uncomfortable with being traded in a fantasy league, you can opt out.

Have fun playing!


New: 10-year rankings on RePEc

October 20, 2013

RePEc has been publishing rankings of various sorts for over a decade. While many of them can still be considered experimental due to limitations in the data, they have had an impact on the evaluations of institutions, economists and journals in quite a few instances. Gradually, these rankings have been expanded to cover more and more aspects of academic life, as well as slicing them by fields, geography, gender and age. These rankings have typically considered all publications listed in RePEc. This can be a disadvantage for younger economists and publication series (although there are criteria that discount citations by age, for example).

We are now introducing a new set of rankings that limit themselves to publications in the last 10 years. For example, to compute an impact factor for a journal, only articles published in the last 10 years are considered. For an economist, anything published over 10 years ago is dismissed (unless the article version falls within 10 years). The ranking page has links to all those new 10-year rankings.

A few caveats: As samples are smaller than for the general rankings, the 10-year rankings will be more volatile, and any measurement error will be larger. For this reason, the 10-year rankings are not computed for fields and geographies. Also, any criterion that is based on recursive factors will still need some time to stabilize as they have to go through several iterations for them to converge, and they will never fully converge, as new data keeps coming in and data will have to be dropped every year. Finally, we cannot count research from publishers who do not supply publication years.


Correcting content in RePEc

October 11, 2013

The decentralized nature of metadata collection in RePEc can make it challenging for users to understand where to ask for corrections to incorrect data. In particular, in the vast majority of the cases, asking the RePEc team to amend something is not the solution even though this is the first reaction of users. To facilitate this process, we now have a page on IDEAS that describes whom to address requests for corrections. In most cases these are the metadata publishers, but there are exceptions.


RePEc in September 2013

October 4, 2013

What is new this month? We inaugurated a job market paper archive for the doctoral students looking for academic opportunities. We welcomed a few new participant archives: Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies, ROME Network, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Competitività Regole Mecati (CERM), Job Market Paper Archive, Associazione Italiana Economisti del Lavoro, Now Publishers. We also counted 525,434 file downloads and 2,100,794 abstract views in September 2013. Finally, we passed only one threshold this month: 400000 items indexed by JEL code. There will be much more to report next month.