Using the RePEc search engines

January 24, 2020

RePEc seeks to enhance the dissemination of economics research. There are many ways to do this, and an important one is to provide search engines for literature searches. This post discusses two on them. Searching on RePEc provides many advantages over searching with your favorite web search engine: search are naturally limited to academic economics content and can be configured in many ways because RePEc has much more detailed information.

EconPapers

EconPapers is a popular site that allows to discover all RePEc content through browsing or searching. The advanced search page highlights all the fields that can be used to narrow the search: date, field (through JEL code), document type, online availability, and language. One can differentiate the search terms across author, keyword, and abstract fields. Boolean searches with logical operators are available and wild cards can be used on word stems. It is also possible to search within NEP reports if one is looking for a working paper within a specific field. A help page provide further hints and tricks for an efficient search.

EconPapers displays search results in a convenient way, showing the listing in a box and one can click on individual items to see the full content. Results can be sorted by date, relevance, or alphabetically by title.

IDEAS

IDEAS is another popular site with functionalities similar to EconPapers. Its search engine was recently improved. It offers similar fielded search with a few tricks that differentiate it from EconPapers. For example, word stemming is algorithmic, thus wildcards are not needed. Synonyms are used natively, reducing the need to think about them. One can search for AuthorOne AuthorTwo (Year), the typical way one cites in economics, and a match will most likely be displayed. A search from the listing of a journal of a working paper series limits the results to that serials. The same feature is available for JEL codes. The search page also offers separate searches for other item types in RePEc, such as registered authors and institutions.

Search results can be sorted by citation counts or a combination of criteria. In addition, on can save a search to MyIDEAS, which allows to go back to it easily later or get weekly email alerts about new search results. Individual search results can also be saved to one’s personal MyIDEAS bibliography with one click.

4 Comments | Bibliographic features in RePEc, RePEc features | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in 2019

January 4, 2020

2019 has been an interesting year. Indeed, while traffic has been on a long decline for the set of reporting RePEc services, there has been a major turnaround in 2019. For those services, we counted 5,821,298 full text downloads and 28,629,161 abstract views, numbers that are the highest since 2017 and 2013 respectively. We will see whether this trend will continue in 2020. A contributing factor may be the continuous improvements of the websites that drive most of this traffic. This blog will talk over the next year about how RePEc services distinguish themselves from other more generic services and thus are particularly useful for economists and the general public interested in economics.

Of course, this growth of traffic was likely also fuelled by an increase in content indexed by RePEc. We can highlight the following numbers:
87 new RePEc archives,
66,000 new working papers, with 200 new working paper series,
167,000 new journal articles, with 400 new journals,
for a total of almost a quarter million newly indexed works,
2,600 newly registered authors,
and 3,200 NEP reports.

Looking forward to 2020!

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in December 2019

January 4, 2020

The big news of the month is that there are now over 3 million works indexed in RePEc. This achievement would never have been reached without the help of our over 2,000 RePEc archive maintainers. The latest ones to join this group were: Junior Scientific Researcher (Romania), Croatian Economic Association. We also counted 507,039 file downloads and 2,906,575 abstract views, Finally, the full list of the milestones we reached over last month is:

3,000,000 works listed
500,000 working papers with references
8,000 ranked institutions

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