A little more than 20 years ago, the RePEc Author Service was launched (then under the name of HoPEc) as a self-registering service. This allows economists to create an account with RePEc. What for? This blog post is trying to enumerate all the uses of this account that were created since.
Unique identification
Before all the other identification services for academics and researchers, we created the RePEc short-ID, a unique identifier attached to a registered person. This identifier is used throughout RePEc much in the same way other objects are identified through handles: series, journals, papers, articles, institutions, archives… They can references each other, they can be used to draw statistics (including rankings). The use is not limited to RePEc: we see it for example in Wikipedia, Wikidata, and elsewhere.
Research record
Creating an account in the RePEc Author Service also allows an economist to establish and maintain a record of their scholarly output. The RePEc Author Service tries to match works indexed in RePEc with name variations provided by the author and asks the author to validate the potential matches. Not only does this establish a research record for the person, it also allows to disambiguate homonyms or authors with the same initials and last names. The research records are public and used by other RePEc services like EconPapers and IDEAS. The RePEc Author Service also helps in the discovery of citations for CitEc, which also maintains author pages.
The records from the RePEc Author Service facilitate other data improvements in RePEc. For example, affiliation data is leveraged in EDIRC, the directory of economics institutions to provide member lists. In addition, if several works within an author’s record have very similar titles, we deem them to be different versions of each other and we can link across them in bibliographic records.
Access to personalized services
Everything on RePEc is available for free and without registration because we believe this is how you provide the widest dissemination of research. Yet, there are some enhanced services that are impossible without providing personalization. The following examples do not require one to be an author, only to have an account with the RePEc Author Service:
- MyIDEAS allows to create a personalize bibliography while browsing IDEAS and then export it in various formats. It also allows to follow authors, serials, JEL codes or search keywords either through the website or weekly email digests.
- MyCitEc allows an author to manage their citation profile and get alerts about new citations, including citations to other authors’ works.
- Authors can get a personalized ranking analysis.
Authentication for other tools
The RePEc Author Service uses OpenID, which is a protocol that allows other websites to leverage the authentication on the RePEc Author Service to log in elsewhere. This is similar to using Google or Facebook credentials to identify yourself on other sites. This is used across RePEc wherever credentials are necessary to identify a person. Examples are:
- Log into the RePEc Genealogy, a wiki that tracks who graduate when, where and with which advisor to create an academic genealogy tree. This data is also used to list alumni on EDIRC, the directory of economics institutions, and to rank graduate programs.
- For RePEc Biblio editors to manage the pages identifying the most important works for their topics.
- Identify datasets used in one’s research.
- Contribute links between different versions of the same work that have not been identified with the procedure described above, for example when the title has changed.
- Play in the fantasy league.
- Upload a job market paper.
- Be listed on the directory of economists on Twitter.
- Manage a reading list.
- Manage a publication compilation for a custom set of authors.
- Submit references for works that could not be considered for citation analysis.
- Various functions on RePEc sites that require an administrative role.
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