Help build the academic tree of Economics: the RePEc Genealogy

April 22, 2018

Beyond the open bibliography that lays the foundation of RePEc, various services have emerged that enhance the data collected with RePEc. One of them is the RePEc Genealogy. The goal of this initiative is to build an academic family tree for Economics, recording who was advised by whom, where and when. It thus tries to build links among the over 50,000 economists registered with the RePEc Author Service as well as the institutions listed in EDIRC. At the time of writing this, close to 13,000 economists from over 1000 programs are listed in the RePEc Genealogy.

The data is collected by the community: The RePEc Genealogy is a wiki, and all you need is a registration with the RePEc Author Service to add information to it. You can make sure your own record is complete, add your students or whose of your advisor, or ensure that your graduate program or alma mater are properly recorded. Over 3,000 economists have already contributed to it. Go to the RePEc Genealogy crowdsourcing tool to participate and see some statistics about the genealogy.

How is the collected data used? Of course, one can browse the site for information. But the data is also used in other ways: IDEAS uses it to complement author profiles, to compute rankings of graduate programs (publications from all years or last 10 years), a ranking of economist by graduation cohorts. Finally, data from the Genealogy is starting to be used for research, along with data from the rest of RePEc. You could be part of the data that you are analysing! For a listing of papers using RePEc data, see here.

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

RePEc in March 2018

April 4, 2018

In March, we welcomed a diverse set of new participating archives: Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Finance Think (Macedonia) and Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis. WE counted 507,929 file downloads and 2,025,384 abstract views through EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP and Socionet. And we reached the following milestones:

20,000,000 downloads through EconPapers
700,000 working papers available for download
500,000 articles with extracted references
10,000 NEP report followers on Twitter

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

RePEc innovates with new initiative in Paris

April 1, 2018

RePEc has been at the forefront of the dissemination of economics research for over twenty years, and has in particular been among the first if not the first across all sciences to introduce features such as open bibliographies, open citations, author identifiers, and publication rankings. Following our mission of democratization of access to research, we are proud to announce yet another innovation that will help us bringing economic research to the public: we have received the authorization to take over two bouquinistes boxes in Paris. Bouquinistes maintain since the 16th century about 1000 boxes on the left and right banks of the Seine in central Paris where they sell antique and used books and magazines. The RePEc boxes, pictured above, are on the left bank on Quai Conti close to the Monnaie de Paris, the historical coin mint that will help to maintain the boxes.

The boxes will contain used working papers, which given the publication delays in economics may still be ahead of their versions published in refereed journals. Thus the pedestrian passing by will be better informed about research in economics than journal subscribers. Volunteers will be on hand to guide interested readers. Note that despite these boxes being located in a French-speaking country, it is not expected that the majority of the working papers will be in French. Volunteers interested in participating should enquire at the Monnaie de Paris Boutique.

For other volunteer opportunities with RePEc, see our volunteers page.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann