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
- 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.
- 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
- The settings now allow to stop receiving the monthly update emails or the emails with new suggestions of potential works.
- Under contacts, users can add their Twitter or Mastodon handles.
- Coming soon: Adding other identifiers, such as ORCID, Google Scholar, WikiData.
- 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.
The RePEc Blog 