Economics Replication Wiki now on IDEAS

July 16, 2014

A major part of the scientific process is the replication of previous studies, something necessary to confirm that things were done right, that they are not sensitive to details and that results have not changed with the passage of time, either because the methods got better or the data has evolved. Unfortunately, there is little replication in economics, and if there is some, it is difficult to publish it. One can theorize why this may be the case, but it is clear replication studies are little valued and not particularly welcome in journals. It is also quite difficult to determine whether a particular study has been replicated.

To help with all that, the Center for Statistics at the University of Göttingen (Germany) has launched a Wiki to index replicated and replicating studies in economics, with funding from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. As it is a wiki, it is crowd-sourced in the sense that any registered person can amend the records, and in particular add replication studies. One can also add to a list of articles published in top journals that should warrant replication and vote (anonymously) from that list (current winners).

The listings on this Replication Wiki are now indexed on IDEAS as well. The principle is similar to the indexation of Wikipedia articles: if a study on the Wiki has a link to IDEAS (or EconPapers, IDEAS will link back. Those adding or amending entries on the Wiki are thus encouraged to link to the IDEAS abstract page to create the backlink on IDEAS.

As any crowd-sourced project, the Replication Wiki will only live from the participation from the public. If you know of replication studies, consider spending a few minutes and add to this wiki.

Leave a Comment » | Bibliographic features in RePEc, Economics Profession | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in June 2014

July 4, 2014

We got a good crop of new participating archives this month: Italian Association for the Study of Economic Asymmetries, National Association of Romanian Valuers, Association of Private Enterprise Education, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, VU University Amsterdam, Centre for Macroeconomics (London), Small Arms Data Observatory, Şcoala Naţională de Studii Politice şi Administrative, Journal of Studies in Dynamics and Change, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA).

Traffic was rather low this month, though: 416,168 file downloads and 1,728,798 abstract views. This was in part due to a larger than usual share of raw traffic we had to eliminate because it looked suspicious. Unfortunately, these checks take longer and longer because we see more and more creative and puzzling things in our logs.

And we reached the following thresholds:
125000000 cumulative article abstract views
900000 listed articles are available online
500000 listed papers are available online
10000 utils used in transactions in the fantasy league market

Leave a Comment » | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Small changes to RePEc ranking statistics

July 1, 2014

With the next RePEc rankings and statistics to be released in a few days, a couple of small changes will be implemented.

First, we have adjusted the way the recursive and discounted recursive impact factors were used for weighting article pages, documents, and citations. A scaling factor was previously applied twice instead of once. The correction does not affect the rankings in any way, but it allows authors to replicate their scores. New scores are 21.4 times higher.

Second, we have started preventing republished articles from counting in the impact factors of the republishing journal. Also, these articles are dropped from the list of top recent works.

Leave a Comment » | RePEc rankings | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann