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.
The RePEc Blog 