Let us first discuss what is new from last month. First, IDEAS changed its website layout to be more friendly for our users on mobile users. Other RePEc websites will soon follow suit. Second, the NEP-CWA (Central and Western Asia) has been revived. And third, we welcome the following new RePEc archives: University of Tennessee, KSP Journals, Davidson College, Instytut Badañ Strukturalnych, Montana State University, Institute of Agroecology and Environmental Management. For the set of RePEc services that share such statistics, we counted 497,673 file downloads and 1,901,689 abstract views in December 2014.
This all helped us pass the following thresholds last month:
1700000 items listed in RePEc
600000 items with extracted and matched references
500000 working papers with abstracts
400000 cited articles
300000 working papers with JEL codes
1750 participating archives
1000 followers on NEP twitter feeds
Now, what have we acheived in 2014? For one, our archive maintainers (of which there are 122 more) have added a ton of material: over 200’000 works, or an increase of 14%. While 54’000 working papers and 220 new series were added, the big push came from journals with 266 new journals and almost 150’000 new articles indexed in RePEc. Over 4’000 authors are newly registered. We counted 25 million abstract views and over 6 million downloads. The RePEc team has also worked hard to improve the user experiences, making the website more accessible for mobile devices as well as secure, and adding many features: NEP reports are now available through Twitter, CitEc added many new features, and we are now working with the Replication Wiki.
While in some ways one can consider RePEc to be a mature project, it dates back to 1997 in its current form, it is still surprising how much growth it is experiencing. And there is still a lot of potential, especially in terms of enhancing the information disseminated by RePEc. We will see more of that over the next year.