The RePEc Blog

The main purpose of RePEc is the dissemination of economics research. Over time, various services were added to the bibliographic mission, including rankings of economists according to their publication output. Despite being still experimental (we will see why), these rankings have become quite important in the profession. This post explains how authors can best leverage the various RePEc services to improve their standing in these rankings. The rankings are computed using a number of criteria, each highlighting different aspects of research productivity. The headers below reflect these categories.

Number of works

Several criteria are just counts of works. The difference is that the works are weighted using various impact factors. To best leverage this, it is important that an author has as many works as possible listed in RePEc. This indexing is typically done by the publisher, which would be a publishing house in the case of books, book chapters or articles, or the local research institution for working papers. Over 1700 such publishers currently participate, and more can join by following these instructions. It is all free.

If that does not help, one can upload a working paper version at the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA). It will be listed as a working paper, not as an article, but at least it is on RePEc. Many publishers allow a version that is prior to the final published version to be disseminated there, you can check on the policies at SHERPA/RoMEO

Finally, only the works that the author has claimed on the RePEc Author Service are counted. Authors get emails when something new may be there, but action by author is required to add this to the profile (very few publishers add a code that puts the work directly into the profile). So check your account on a regular basis, and make sure all the possible variations of your name are listed there, or RePEc cannot find all matches.

Number of pages

This criterion applies only to works published in journals and uses several weighting schemes. But the same principles apply as above: if some article is missing on RePEc, get the publisher to participate. Sometimes the publisher is actually participating but is not indexing that particular journal, volume, issue or article. Complain with the publisher, not RePEc. Any page on a RePEc service associated with that publisher has a contact email address for such purposes. Complain there as well if there is an error in the listing for any of your works.

Note that some journals do not provide page numbers. It is therefore not possible to count pages in such cases.

Number of citations

Again, these counts are weighted in various ways. The basis are the citations discovered by the CitEc project. This is likely where the data is the most experimental as some publishers do not allow access to full texts to extract references or link to an intersticial page before the full text. Authors can help here, though, by supplying reference lists. There is a form that asks for all references of an articles, not just those that cite the author. The hope is that this will help complete more rapidly the database, and this gives everyone the opportunity to contribute to a public good. Over 1000 authors have helped so far.

Note that matching references to documents in RePEc is a difficult exercise and pairs that fall in a grey zone are sent to the RePEc Author Service for authors to verify. So check from time to time whether there is something waiting for you there.

It can also help to consolidate different versions of the same work. This is done automatically if the title is identical and the author has all versions in the profile. If the titles differ, this form allows to establish the links. Also, encourage also those who cite you to be registered, as two criteria use this information.

Finally, we cannot count citations to works that are not listed in RePEc. If the article is not listed, getting a working paper version listed will help.

Abstract views and downloads

We can only count what is going through the participating RePEc services. For example, a link from an author’s homepage to a full text on the publisher’s website cannot be captured because it did not transit through RePEc. Thus, either provide a link to the author’s profile from IDEAS or EconPapers, or put a link to abstract pages from these services. Put a link to the profile page in the email signature. Note also that working papers generate many more downloads than articles. So, keep your working papers in your profile if you publish an article!

Unfortunately, the temptation to manipulate these numbers is big. Hence, a number of safeguards have been put in place: repeatedly downloading a paper will count only once, for example. Tell your class to download your papers and you will earn a zero. More details (but not too many) can be found on the site that published these statistics, LogEc.

Co-authorship network

Two criteria are based on how central an author is in the co-authorship network. Details can be found at CollEc. To improve one’s score here, one needs of course to get co-authors to be listed on RePEc with a profile (and their co-authors, too).

Student advising

This looks at how good an author’s doctoral students are performing with respect to all the criteria above. Thus, if one has been advising students, one needs to make sure this is recorded in RePEc. If the students have a profile, head to the RePEc Genealogy and complete their entry in the academics family tree of economics. Or do it for your advisor.

Final thoughts

One may be disappointed that it is a little bit of work to ensure that one is properly taken into account in the RePEc rankings. RePEc is an crowd-sourced project, it thus relies on the contributions of the community, and has done so, we think successfully, since 1997. If everyone pitches in a little (or more), we can make it even better. And if this helps improve one’s ranking, even better!

Of course, there is also the fact that writing better papers helps for one’s ranking, too.