About lost economists

January 30, 2014

A major component of RePEc is the RePEc Author Service, which allows economists to create an online profile of their works as they are indexed in RePEc. There are several benefits to this. For users, cross-links between profiles and abstract pages allow to discover easily what else the authors have written. For authors, they obtain download statistics and citation alerts, and a link they can refer people to their profile. As for departments, authors can count towards their rankings. So far, about 40,000 authors have registered.

Unfortunately, RePEc loses contact with some of the registered economists. The principal reason is that they move to a different address and neglect to amend their contact details at the RePEc Author Service. This is currently the case for about 500 economists, and we encourage notification to RePEc so that we can reconnect with them. A list of such authors is available here.

Sadly, we also lose contact with some economists because they pass away. While we obviously do not want to send them their monthly statistics, we still want to keep their profiles as they continue to provide information to users. This is why volunteers take over maintenance of those profiles. But before doing so, RePEc needs to be alerted that someone has passed away. Thus, do not hesitate to contact the RePEc Author Service administrator in this regard. A list of known deceased and registered economists is here.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

1.5 million documents in RePEc

January 17, 2014

The number of documents indexed in RePEc has recently surpassed 1.5 million. About 900,000 are journal articles, 560,000 are working papers and the rest is distributed across books, book chapters and software components. The number of documents available online is approaching 1.4 million. All this is contributed by over 1,600 archives, ranging from the major commercial publishers to small research centers.

I do not think we expected that many documents related to economics to be listed when RePEc was started. And yet, the number of additions keeps increasing. One would have expected all the low-hanging fruit to have been picked since 1997, but no, they keep coming. Fortunately, RePEc is completely scalable, so we are ready for the next half million. Some RePEc services (those using the RePEc data), however, start struggling a little bit with the mass of data. We expect that some efforts will be dedicated to back-end work for these services.

And if your institution or publisher is still not participating in RePEc, here are instructions. If you are an individual from an institution that does not want to participate, you can upload your works at MPRA and they will be included in RePEc.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in December 2013, and a look back at 2013

January 4, 2014

First about last month. CitEc has a new sponsor. We counted 512,345 file downloads and 2,274,496 abstract views, and we welcomed a small crop of newly participating archives: Redfame Publishing, Warsaw School of Economics, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Universität Trier. The Economists Online website has closed.

Here are the thresholds we passed last December:

500000 documents with extracted and matched references
8000 online books
3000 links from Wikipedia to documents or authors on RePEc sites

As for what we have done over the past year: We inaugurated several new features: the RePEc Biblio, MyIDEAS, 10-year rankings, a job market paper archive, and a fantasy league. We served 6,819,455 downloads and 29,020,533 abstract views. We welcomed 124 newly participating archives that added along with the existing ones about 173,000 documents to RePEc. We also counted over 4,000 newly registered authors. This continuing growth is quite surprising, as we would have thought that all low-hanging fruits were already gathered long ago. But no, they keep coming, and we welcome them with open arms.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann