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.
The RePEc Blog 
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