RePEc has grown to a huge bibliographic database of Economics, now with over 3.4 million works listed. How has all this been indexed. More importantly, how can you get your research output listed on the popular RePEc sites and dissemination services? There are fundamentally two ways: through your institution or individually.
The institutional way
Any institution or publisher (academic, policy org., think tank, commercial, etc.) can open a so-called RePEc archive that contains information about their publications and links to where they can be found. This is in the form of plain text files that are hosted on the institution’s public site (ftp, http or https) and are regularly queried by RePEc services. These files need to follow a specific structure and syntax to be machine-readable. There are currently over 2000 such archives, and they all followed the same instructions. Note that there are some aggregators that follow different rules but forward their data to RePEc: S-WoPEc and S-WoBA in Scandinavia, Dotec in Colombia, EconStor in Germany, HAL in France, Cyberleninka in Russia, and AgEcon Search for Agricultural Economics.
We have a few RePEc archives that lie dormant, usually because the person in charge left without providing instructions. If this is the case for yours, there is help. Start with these instructions.
Note also that if you expect your work to be listed in an existing archive, but it is not, EconPapers and IDEAS list a technical contact for the particular series or journal who should be able to take care of corrections.
The individual way
The vast majority (97.8%) of the RePEc material is indexed by institutions. But for the economists working at a place that does not participate, there are several options that all require that you upload your paper. There is typically also a cursory editorial review conducted by each service, checking that the input data is correct, that the work is indeed academic and within topic, and that they is no copyright issues. Note that the uploaded work does not necessarily need to be recent. It can complement an article that is under fee-gated access or not indexed in RePEc at all. Note also that what you upload will always be considered as a working paper. Only the journal publisher can index articles in RePEc.
Here are services that accept uploads and will index in RePEc if appropriate. They are listed in the order of the number of indexed papers.
- Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA), sponsored by the Library of the University of Munich (Germany). If your paper is not in English, French or German, this is your only option.
- HAL caters to French researchers. Economics content is relayed to RePEc
- ArXiv has sections for a few economic fields. Attention should be paid to the submission process.
- The Open Science Foundation has a pre-print services and several topical archives (in particular SocArXiv). Works within economics are indexed in RePEc.
- EconStor, sponsored by the German Library for Economics (ZBW) accepts also papers in German.
The RePEc Blog 