The RePEc Blog

RePEc allows very rapid dissemination of research. Once a paper or article has been indexed, it is available within 24 hours on EconPapers and IDEAS, and for working papers, disseminated within a week or two through NEP. But this rapid diffusion is only going to happen if the works get indexed on time in the first place. For this, over 1000 archive maintainers are in charge.

On a regular basis, we get enquiries from authors complaining that their works are not showing up and that we should do something about it. Or spider their homepage. This is not how RePEc works. Authors need to contact the respective archive maintainers to keeps listings current. Contact email addresses are provided on EconPapers and IDEAS in the series descriptions. Indeed, the respective publishers have sole authority on their listings. The same applies for any corrections to existing listings.

We also get requests from authors to correct something in their profile, like an affiliation or the listing of works. Again, authors can and should do this themselves by logging into their account at the RePEc Author Service. The only exceptions: the author has lost the password and cannot retrieve anymore emails at the address listed in the account, or the coordinates of a listed affiliation have changed. In both cases, email the RePEc Author Service administrator.

And of course, if something does not seem right, tell us. But the RePEc team has little time to address individual issues. With about 300 new works indexed a day and close to 23000 registered authors, it is simply impossible. Remember, we all do this on our spare time. You can help make RePEc better.

With a little delay, here is the monthly report about what is happening at RePEc. First, the CitEc project, which does citation analysis for RePEc is now being hosted by the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, who took over from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Second, we welcome 10 new participating archives: Academia Sinica, Purdue University (II), GRIPS, COMISEF, University of Münster, Institute of Education (University of London), Public Finance=Finances publiques, University of Alicante, Spiru Haret University (III), and University of Pau. Third, we experienced record traffic, with 918,278 file downloads and 3,324,205 abstract views.

Finally, regarding the thresholds we passed in November:
450000 listed abstracts
150000 cited articles
22000 registered authors

And to anyone going to the ASSA meetings in Atlanta, we hope to see you at our booth in the exhibition hall!

Over 12 years, RePEc has grown to a large community, with 1100 participating archives and over 22000 registered authors. But a community like this is only useful if it is dynamic: participants participate and users use it. It is easy to register and then forget about it. This is why archive and series maintainers, editors and authors get every month an individualized emails as a reminder that they are part of the community, as well as individualized news about their participation.

For editors, archive and series maintainers, the email contains the latest statistics about their publications: downloads and abstract views, impact factors, error message about the syntax of their templates, the URLs of the full texts, or our attempts to reach their data. Maintainers may as well get messages in between if some issues arise.

For authors, monthly emails also contain downloads and abstract views, as well as any new citations discovered by the CitEc project. Also, the email contains a personalized link leading to a ranking analysis of the author according to over 30 criteria. Authors also get separate emails alerting them of potential works they can add to their portfolio.

Keeping regular contact with participants is essential to ensure continued alertness about the project and to keep the collected data as fresh and accurate as possible.

This way again a very busy month, with 878,635 file downloads and 3,199,663 abstract views, which are numbers close to records. We also had 16 new particpating archives: Unversité d’Orléans, Finanzas Púplicas México, “Constantin Brancusi” University of Targu-Jiu, BEPress (II), University of Bacau, Ryerson University, Tblissi State University, Seoul National University, Athens University of Economics and Business, University of Manchester (II), Imperial College, Universté Catholique de Lille, ETH Zurich (IV, V), Towson University, European Commission Joint Research Centre.

In terms of thresholds passed, we report:

30000000 cumulative downloads through IDEAS
750000 cumulative software component downloads
450000 works listed in author profiles
300000 cumulative chapter downloads
1100 participating archives

The bibliographic data displayed in RePEc services originates in about 1100 participating archives, each maintained by a volunteer (see hee for instructions to start a RePEc archive). The quality of the data in RePEc thus depends on the quality of what is entered at the archive level, and there are obviously some variations. In general, we recommend to provide as many bibliographic details as possible so as to improve the chances of each work to be found in user searches. While missing fields are sometimes frustrating for users, the incorrect use of bibliographic fields is more so. This post provides some advice to RePEc archive maintainers regarding the most frequent violations of RePEc taxonomy.

• It is always a good idea to check your series from time to time on EconPapers and IDEAS. A good opportunity is when you get your monthly email. That allows often to uncover errors. Also, use the syntax checker on EconPapers, which usually uncovers why some item is no showing up on RePEc.
  
• The most frequent imprecision in RePEc data is the abuse of the Author-Name field. It should only contain the name of the author, but not his affiliation (which belongs into Author-Workplace-Name) nor his email address (Author-Email). Also, there should be only one author per Author-Name field. With multiple authors, repeat the field.

  Correct use of the Author-Name field is important, because it allows to attribute the works to the appropriate authors in the RePEc Author Service. It frustrates authors when they do not find their own works due to miscodings.
  

• Generally, put in the field what the calls for. There is a surprising number of Title fields that actually contain abstracts, for example. And keywords or classification codes do not belong in the abstract, but in Keywords and Classification-JEL.
  
• Make sure to provide a date for your bibliographic item. Without a date, it cannot be displayed in chronological order. For working papers, they cannot be considered for diffusion through NEP as it cannot be established whether they are new. For working papers, use the Creation-Date field, with a syntax like yyyy, yyyy-mm or yyyy-mm-dd. For articles use Year. The relevant date is the one at which the work was written, not when the bibliographic record was created.
  
• Links to online texts are provided with the File-URL field. It should link directly to the pdf file, not to an intermediate abstract page. There are two reasons: First, users already see an abstract page on the RePEc service. Second, we need a direct link to perform the citation analysis.
  
• The easiest way to including an abstract in a bibliographic record is to cut-and-paste from the pdf file. In some cases, some characters do not travel well. This is especially the case for ligatures like “ff”, “fl”, “fi”, and the like. Also, end-of-line hyphenations need to be removed from abstracts. Thus, always read through an abstract after pasting it.
  
• Never, never recycle handles. Handles are unique identifiers that are used throughout RePEc, for example to assign paper to authors, relate references and determine what is a new record. Avoid changing handles, as this ruptures all these relations that need to be reestablished. But never, never reassign an existing handle to a different item, because this renders exiting relations erroneous.
  
• Bibliographic records should not contain any HTML encoding. If a special character needs to be displayed, says an accented character, use UTF-8 encoding. The usual text editors will provide the byte-order mark (BOM) at the start of the file indicating that it is UTF-8 encoded. But you you generate the files through scripts, they need to explicitly add the BOM.
  

Now that vacations are over, activity on RePEc is as high as ever. Several new features were introduced in September: a Facebook application that allows to display one’s latest research and experimental blogs by NEP editors discussing research in some fields. Traffic has pickep up again, with 763,583 file downloads and 2,735,405 abstract views. Also, 11 new archives joined: University of Bath, Australian Journal of Labour Economics, University of Luxembourg, University of Pécs, University of Tsukuba, Bar-Ilan University, Australian National University (IV), c.MET-05, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna, Kenyon College, International Association for Energy Economics.

Finally, we passed some thresholds, including some major ones:
800,000 works listed
250,000 online working papers
200,000 article abstracts
25,000 NEP reports