The RePEc Blog

Now that users can amend their RePEc Genealogy entry directly from the RePEc Author Service, the academic family tree is seeing new profiles added at a rate of 1000 a month. We added a single new archive that indexes its publications in RePEc: Anser Press. We counted 496,131 file downloads and 1,829,913 abstract views this month. And we reached the following milestone:

16,000 entries in RePEc Genealogy

Last month, we added a new feature to the RePEc Author Service: users can now add their education information. We also picked up a good number of new participating archives: International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, Silesian University of Technology, Journal of Economic Policy and Management Issues, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Université du Québec à Montréal (II), Consorcio de Investigación Económica y Social (Peru), Czech Academy of Agricultural Science, We counted 519,267 file downloads and 2,013,230 abstract views. and we reached the following milestones:

125,000,000 cumulative abstract views on EconPapers
3,500,000 items with abstracts
25,000 books with citations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is much discussed these days. Indeed, it shows great promise in all sorts of endeavors, including writing essays on many topics. For the latter, while various attempts so far have not been entirely convincing, in particular because AI tools tend to invent references and cannot create new knowledge, there is still a threat that someone could excessively leverage these tools to pretend to have done their research.

Such abuse is supposed to be discovered in the peer-review process, but readers of pre-prints (working papers, discussion papers, etc.) may be caught off guard. As pre-prints are the primary type of publication that RePEc users read, we have been looking for a solution.

We are proud to announce that RePEc is collaborating with startup PiscesAI in developing a certification tool for pre-prints. This tool leverages AI to beat it at its own game: find what is written by AI and what is not. Authors can now request their working paper to be analyzed and certified as being AI-free. To do so, they need to log in the RePEc Author Service and look for the AI certification link. Once certified, participating RePEc services display a logo on the abstract page of the paper.

As mentioned before, this tool is only available for pre-prints. However, journals that do not conduct peer review can also ask for this privilege. For this, they need to contact the administrator email on the RePEc Author Service. They will then be marked as being available to authors for this certification service.

We have been very busy lately, which partially explains why the blog post is so late. Indeed, all the St. Louis Fed hosted sites migrated to new infrastructure. Simultaneously, the RePEc Author Service was relaunched with a completely rewritten code base which should allow it to handle better the tremendous increase of authors and works it handles. It is also getting gradually more and more new features.

In other news, we welcomed PC Technology Center (Ukraine), Multimedia SRL (Romania) and International Scientific Network (ISNet). We counted 427,181 file downloads and 1,622,285 abstract views. And we reached the following milestones:

1,000,000 items with a JEL classification code.

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

RePEc proudly celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2022, 25 years of being entirely run by volunteers and providing free services to economists and people interested in economic research. We also worked over the year, with the following to show:

• 34 publishers and other publication providers joined RePEc
• 2,218 economists registered with the RePEc Author Service, bringing the total to 65,752 (with 1,941,046 works in their profiles)
• We counted 21,172,731 abstract views and 5,390,781 file downloads through the reporting RePEc services
• We expanded the RePEc services for social media users to Mastodon
• We inaugurated a new RePEc homepage that explains better what RePEc is and does.
• We mourned the loss of the Russian RePEc service, Socionet.
• The over 2000 RePEc archive maintainers added: 109 working paper series, 108,111 working papers, 128 journals, 320,367 articles, 2,502 books, 20,374 book chapters, 171 software components. We now have over 4.2 million works indexed in RePEc
• Citation extraction at CitEc worked overtime, adding references from 282,003 works.
• The NEP editors released 2,474 reports disseminating new working papers in their respective fields of research.

Specifically for December 2022, we had two new RePEc archives: the Romanian Academy and the International Scientific Community National Science. We recorded 415,652 file downloads and 1,620,115 abstract views through , IDEAS, and NEP. And we reached the following milestones:
1,250,000 book downloads
200,000 indexed book chapters

Some innovation last month: IDEAS now has a directory of economists on Mastodon, which allows them to verify their identity. Also, NEP now also disseminates new working papers through Mastodon. We welcomed a few new RePEc archives: IFS CEMMAP, Plus Communication, Henry Stewart Publications, Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology. We counted 504,980 file downloads and 1,960,157 abstract views over the month. And we reached the following milestones:

10,000,000 software component abstract views
5,500 indexed working paper series

With lots of movement in the social media landscape, this post gives you an overview of the ways RePEc can help you on social media, at least when you intend to use it for professional purposes.

Finding economists on social media and being found

If you want to use social media for professional purposes, the first problem you face is to find other economists to follow or communicate with. For two networks, Twitter and Mastodon, RePEc offers help.
Twitter: The listing of economists on Twitter has over name 2000 names, organized by fields, locations, and more. Each has an associated Twitter list, meaning that you just need to follow the Twitter list and you automatically follow a timeline with all its members. Instructions are also provided on how to get listed.
Mastodon:: Given the decentralized nature, it is more challenging to find people to follow, especially if they are located on another Mastodon instance. RePEc can help with a recently created listing of economists on Mastodon, again organized by fields, locations, and more. An additional benefit of being on that list is that the link to the IDEAS author profile on the Mastodon profile can be verified, thereby providing an identity verification.

Linking to economic research on social media

If you are discussing economic research on social media, we want to encourage you to link to an IDEAS page instead of directly to the paper of interest. Here are the advantages:

1. On many social media platforms, this will automatically create a so-called card, that is, a preview of what is in the link. IDEAS, for example, will display the title along with an image containing title, author and abstract. This known to work on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon, Slack, WhatsApp and Telegram.
2. Not everyone may have access to the paper. RePEc sites often offer alternative versions.
3. RePEc URLs are permanent. Full-text URLs may move or disappear.
4. RePEc pages offer more context (links to author profiles, citations, references, and more
5. For blogs, the blog post is then listed on EconAcademics as well as on the IDEAS citation tab of the mentioned paper.
6. Authors get credited for the traffic.

Finding new economic research on social media

RePEc offers also the option to follow new economic research on social media. At this point this is only available for Mastodon, with separate Mastodon accounts to follow in close to 100 economic fields. The NEP homepage has links to them. A similar initiative gathered 20,000 followers on Twitter until the platform banned these accounts, unfortunately.