How RePEc can help you in times of upheaval, and how you can help RePEc

March 31, 2020

The academic, business and policy worlds currently through quite a bit of upheaval as people work from home, classes have moved on-line or have been canceled. People have to adapt to working differently. In various ways RePEc can help.


Bibliographic tools available off-campus

EconPapers and IDEAS are bibliographic websites for Economics that are accessible from anywhere. No need to be on campus or connecting through VPN to access a proprietary bibliographic tool.

Links to open versions of gated articles

Similarly to the above, if you cannot access some articles behind a publisher’s pay-gate, IDEAS often offers you another version in the form of an open-access working paper. Relevant links are on the articles pages on EconPapers and IDEAS.

Covid-19 related material updated daily

Material on RePEc is updated daily with feeds from over 2000 publishers. You can find material about Covid-19 easily by searching EconPapers and IDEAS. For example, this search on IDEAS gives you all the listed material, sorted by most recently indexed. The match count increases hourly.

Get rapid dissemination of Covid-19 related material

You did a study and want it rapidly disseminated? If your institution has its publications already indexed in RePEc, you are fine. If not, you can upload your study at MPRA for rapid dissemination through the various RePEc services, including NEP.

Find topical material about pandemics

The RePEc Biblio has curated listings of the most relevant works in various fields, including a topic on the Economics of pandemics and its sub-topics.

The current situation may also imply that some people have more time than usual, or have a need for some distractions. This may be a good opportunity to help RePEc in various ways. Some opportunities are below.


  • Offer to create a RePEc Biblio topic in your area of specialization

  • Contribute information about your students, advisors, and former students in your graduate program to the RePEc Genealogy. Note that the collected information is used for the ranking of graduate programs, so in a way you are helping yourself.

  • Take a moment to check that your RePEc Author Service profile is still current, in particular that there are no works waiting to be claimed, contact details are OK (many personal homepages are not), and that affiliations are fine. And if you not yet have a profile, create one!

  • Correct broken links in the directory of economic institutions, EDIRC. They are all marked with a red broken chain link.

  • We lost contact with some of our registered authors. Give use their new email address! They are listed with a red question mark on IDEAS and EDIRC, or all together here. If they have unfortunately died, we want to record that, too!

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

RePEc in February 2020

March 6, 2020

Another good month in terms of traffic to reporting RePEc services: 459,113 file downloads and 2,282,794 abstract views. Welcomed a few more archives: Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Entrepreneur’s Guide, Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi Hryhorii Skovoroda State Pedagogical University, University College London. And we reached a few more milestones:

2,000,000 indexed articles available online
1,500,000 indexed articles with abstracts
1,250,000 cited items
1,200,000 items with references
800,000 cited articles

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

NEP: The working paper dissemination service of RePEc

March 1, 2020

The central mission of RePEc is to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics. Various RePEc services take this to heart in various ways, and today we have a look at NEP (New Economics Papers). This service disseminates new working papers through email, RSS feeds and Twitter. As everything in RePEc this is a free service run by volunteers that currently manages about 80,000 email subscriptions, 20,000 Twitter followers and an unknown number of RSS subscribers.

NEP has currently close to 100 email lists, each handling new papers for a particular sub-field of Economics. Every week, the volunteer editors receive a list of about 1000 new working papers ordered by relevance by an expert system following editors’ past choices. Editors then look over this list and select the working papers that they deem most relevant to their field. They are then sent to subscribers. Only working papers are considered. Indeed, they are at the frontier of research and thus can be considered new research. Publications in journals may lag by several years and are thus not considered.

The classification of new research by NEP field is also used to categorize researchers for various purposes, including rankings (economists and their institutions) and research on the Economics profession.

NEP is open to the creation of new reports and encourages volunteer editors to step forward and contact Marco Novarese, Università del Piemonte Orientale in Italy. Technical aspects of NEP are managed by Thomas Krichel. Hosting for NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand. Development is funded by small and infrequent advertisements on the NEP emails.

Leave a Comment » | Bibliographic features in RePEc, Dissemination of research in Economics | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann