CitEc is the RePEc citation indexing service. CitEc extracts reference data from documents directly or from data about references provided by publishers. Then CitEc links references to find citations between documents available in RePEc. All data produced by CitEc is freely available. It is distributed to other RePEc services to enrich the services provided to researchers and authors. It is used to build citation profiles for registered authors, for working paper series and journals. I created CitEc in 1998. Nowadays, it contains over 41 million references and 14 million citations. This may be impressive numbers. But the data comes from 1.376.000 papers. Note that there are 2.737.000 downloable items in RePEc. Thus, I have been able to process only the 50% of the downloable items.
There is still a lot of work to do. You can help. Let’s see how.
1.- Providing references
One important approach to get references is to use the full text of documents. In many cases, we can extract that from the PDF files when we have them. However, PDFs are often behind tool gated portals. That is often due to economic issues like payment licenses. Sometimes it is due technical barriers, like the archive maintainer not providing an URL with direct access to the PDF file.
In these cases, you can help by submitting the full list of references cited. You do not need to be the author of the paper to submit the references. You may, for instance, submit references for a document that cites your work.
Thus, go ahead and use the web user input form. Thanks!
2.- Providing citations
Citations are relationships between two documents. Both the citing and the cited document must have a RePEc handle, thatis, be indexed in RePEc. The majority of citations are identified automatically by CitEc software. In addition, there are several ways to contribute citations to the database when the system has failed to find them.
A.- Register with the RePEc Author Service and use the search engine to add citations to your profile
B.- If you already know the paper which cites your work, follow the instructions in our FAQ (3.5)
C.- Otherwise, you can use the main CitEc search engine to look for the cited work in the references database. Just enter one author’s
surname and publication date for the cited work. You will get two types of results: citations and references. When you see a citation, CitEc has been able to match the reference to the cited document in RePEc. When you see a reference, CitEc has not been unable to find the cited document in RePEc. In some cases, the cited document is in RePEc but the system has not found it. You can help us to solve the problem by providing the link to the cited document. Just click on the “add citation now” link and give the handle of the cited document.
Many thanks for your contribution. If you have any question contact us at citechelp. Also, if you would like to get more involved with citation analysis, contact us!
Posted by Jose Manuel Barrueco 
The RePEc Blog 