As we will very soon add a new institution ranking (voting on it will soon close. Edit: The new ranking is now live), it is a good opportunity to recap how institutions can optimize how they are getting ranked in RePEc. For the existing rankings, see here.
- Get your authors listed, and with proper affiliations
- The score of an institution is determined by the authors that declare being affiliated with in. If authors are not registered with the RePEc Author Service or have not declared the institution among their affiliation(s), we cannot count them towards the institutional ranking. Institutions can check who is registered by looking themselves up at EDIRC, RePEc’s institutional directory. Note that authors with several affiliations have to allocate percentages to each, and their scores are distributed according to those shares.
- Get your authors to maintain their profiles
- Authors are ranked as well, and whatever allows them to optimize their ranking scores works for their home institutions as well. You can follow this blog post on this topic.
- Get your publications listed
- This applies in particular to working papers. If the local working papers are indexed in RePEc, then local authors can add them to their profiles, and then only can they count towards the institution. Knowing that working papers are downloaded much more frequently than articles, this makes a difference. Also, if an article or book chpater is therwise not available, citations to them can still be captured if there is a working paper version available. Instructions on how to index publications in RePEc are here.
- Link to those publications
- As the various RePEc services provide listings for your working papers, you can link to them. Some even skip listing them on their website, linking only to RePEc. Two popular sites for that are EconPapers and IDEAS.
- Have graduates listed as well
- Through the RePEc Genealogy, departments can now list the graduates from their doctoral program. This matters because the performance of graduate programs is one of the factors in determining the rankings. Again, EDIRC has those alumni listed.
Posted by Christian Zimmermann 
The RePEc Blog 