The RePEc Blog

The RePEc Author Service has been rewritten from scratch. This blog post explains what the changes are and what our users should expect.

The site was rewritten because it suffered from extensive technical debt and because it was using an too great amount of resources, suffering from the growth of its userbase and the bibliographic holdings in RePEc since its inception.

What changes

1. Users will need to reset their password. Passwords are not present in clear test in the database, both in the new and old ones. They are encrypted with new keys, and thus need to be reset . Users can request an password reset email to be sent to them from this form. If the email address is not accessible, contact the administrator.
2. Suggestions are solely based on name variations. Previously suggestions for works to add to user profiles were based on the provided name variations as well as the last name of the user. With the size of the database this has become too much for many users. Now suggestions are solely based on name variations, and users will receive fewer useless emails. However, users need to make sure they have covered all the ways a publisher may refer to them, in particular middle names.

New features

1. The settings now allow to stop receiving the monthly update emails or the emails with new suggestions of potential works.
2. Under contacts, users can add their Twitter or Mastodon handles.
3. Coming soon: Adding other identifiers, such as ORCID, Google Scholar, WikiData.
4. Coming soon: Adding education information, which will also be visible on the RePEc Genealogy.

Temporarily missing features

Various smaller features will be missing only temporarily. One that will take longer to implement is the citation matching. The bulk of the citation matching is still continuing at CitEc. On the RePEc Authors Service, users were helping to clear the uncertain citation matches. We hope to bring this feature back once the easier features are dealt with.

What is new? We now have a new email address to support all the St. Louis Fed based RePEc services, in particular IDEAS, EDIRC, and the RePEc Author Service. We welcomed three new archives: Yale University (III), ANIF Centro de Estudios Económicos, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics. We counted 1,602,883 abstract views and 453,802 file downloads across the reporting RePEc services. And for milestones, we have:

4,300,000 indexed works
3,900,000 works available online

MyIDEAS is a tool that allows users to create in a personal account bibliographies. It also allows to track new papers in economics along various dimensions, such as particular authors, series, journals, JEL codes and search keywords. In this blog post, we offer a glimpse at what MyIDEAS users are interested in.

As users navigate IDEAS while logged in, they can add items to their personal bibliography and then to particular folders. These can be made public, for example to share with co-authors or students. Currently only 5% of the bibliographies are public. The series or journals appearing most frequently in those bibliographies are:

1. MPRA Paper, University Library of Munich, Germany
2. NBER Working Papers, National Bureau of Economic Research
3. American Economic Review, American Economic Association
4. IZA Discussion Papers, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
5. PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science
6. Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier
7. CEPR Discussion Papers, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
8. Post-Print, HAL
9. Policy Research Working Paper Series, The World Bank
10. Sustainability, MDPI

Interestingly, this list is quite different from the series and journals that users follow:

1. American Economic Review, American Economic Association
2. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press
3. Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press
4. Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press
5. A HREF=”https://ideas.repec.org/s/aea/jeclit.html”>Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association
6. Econometrica, Econometric Society
7. Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association
8. Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier
9. Journal of Finance, American Finance Association
10. The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press

As for the most followed JEL codes, this gives an indication as to which fields are the most popular:

1. E – Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
2. I – Health, Education, and Welfare
3. O – Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth
4. J – Labor and Demographic Economics
5. G – Financial Economics
6. F – International Economics
7. R – Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics
8. H – Public Economics
9. C – Mathematical and Quantitative Methods
10. N – Economic History