A new initiative on research blogging

September 30, 2009

We have discussed on various occasions new means of research dissemination and peer review on this blog. One way that could show promise is blogs that discuss research. There are still only few of them, and their readership is still rather small compared to the big current events blogs (and it may be better so). We want to explore whether blog can become a sustainable and useful way of dissemination, discussing and even advancing research in Economics.

To this end, a blog aggregator specialized on research blogs in Economics was created last year: EconAcademics. Some NEP editors are now starting an experiment whereby they highlight and open for discussion one working paper a week. This paper is taking from their weekly list of new working papers, specific to their field. For now, two such NEP blogs are in place: NEP-DGE (Dynamic General Equilibrium) and NEP-OPM (Open Macroeconomics). Others may follow soon and will be listed both in the side bar of this blog and on EconAcademics.

We hope that the selected papers will generate some interesting discussion. We will see whether the profession is ready for this type of discussion. Earlier attempts with the defunct WoPEc and with the Society of Labor Economists failed. A current initiative at the Economics E-Journal seems to work somewhat. Watch and participate in the NEP blogs!

2 Comments | Dissemination of research in Economics | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

How abstract views and downloads are counted

September 19, 2009

Authors and RePEc archive maintainers receive monthly emails with various statistics, and among the most anticipated statistics are our abstract views and download counts. It is important to understand how those statistics are collected and what they measure (and do not measure). Full statistics are available on the LogEc website managed by Sune Karlsson from Örebro University (Sweden).

Participating RePEc services (EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP and Socionet) keep a log of all activity on their sites. This allows us to count page views for the abstract pages of each items in the database (excluding NEP, as abstracts are listed in emails). Logs also record outclicks as users leave the RePEc services to the sites containing the full texts they seeks to download. This allows us to count “downloads”. Quotation marks are required as it is impossible to record whether the download was successful, for example in the case of gated publisher sites. Note also that this means that downloads that have not transited through a RePEc cannot be counted, as we do not have access to local logs.

LogEc gathers the logs from the participating services and aggregates the statistics. This involves much more than bean counting, though. Indeed, one first needs to exclude robot activity, as only human activity is of interest. Some robots declare themselves as such, but other hide their identity. One has thus to infer from various patterns what IP addresses are likely robots. This is an important step, as robots represent typically 75% of raw abstract views. Robots include spiders from many search engines as well as other initiatives on the Internet.

One needs also to weed out multiple views or downloads by the same user. This brings us to detecting attempts at increasing counts by authors. Obviously, we cannot reveal here how this is done, but let it be known that we have detected fraud even by authors using multiple Internet service providers. The methods used lead to some undercounting, though. Multiple users behind the same cache server may be counted only once, as it may for example happen to employees of the US Federal Reserve Banks that use RePEc.

And we are still not done pruning. LogEc then checks for additional patterns that need to be vetted by a human eye. Unusual activity is then checked and often reconciled with traffic from popular blogs, magazines and newspapers. But on other occasions, traffic surges cannot be explained in licit ways and need to be cleaned out.

After all these manipulations, statistics are published and disseminated. And despite substantial pruning, RePEc services still get over 2,000,000 abstract views and 600,000 downloads every month. See LogEc for details.

Leave a Comment » | RePEc features, Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEcFB – An integration of your RePEc data into your Facebook profile

September 9, 2009

Following a suggestion on this blog and the creation of a RePEc Facebook group, we are happy to announce that a new service went online last week. The Facebook application RePEcFB allows Facebook users to integrate their RePEc data into Facebook. Economists on Facebook can create a small profile box listing their recent work, or a “My research” tab in the Facebook profile giving information about their working papers, publications and other research output. Users can list their affiliations and professional contact data, announce recent papers authored by their Facebook friends, or inform about conferences and other academic events they are going to attend. New papers or affiliations can be directly posted to the Wall and can be commented on by friends.

To use the application you both need a Facebook account and a RePEc author profile with RePEc Author Service. Detailed instructions can be found on the Notes tab of the application’s homepage.

RePEcFB was written by Ben Greiner with the help of László Kóczy, Sune Karlsson, and Thomas Krichel. The software is hosted on Sune’s server at Örebro University. The software is under ongoing development, so feel free to send comments to the author.

1 Comment | RePEc features | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in August 2009

September 3, 2009

The quietest month of the year still brought some important news. RePEc now carries bibliographic information about 1000 journals and 300’000 working papers. We counted 647,942 file downloads and 2,213,814 abstract views for the month. For working papers, this adds up to 25 million downloads since we started counting!

In terms of developments, the RePEc Input Service now also allows journals that for some reason cannot open their own RePEc archive to index their articles in RePEc. Also, EconPapers allows users to download bibliographic data in various formats for their own databases. Both developments are due to Sune Karlsson, who also moved EconPapers and LogEc to new hardware.

During August 2009, the following archives joined RePEc: Sam Houston State University, arXiv, National Insurance Institute of Israel, University of Rome Sapienza (II), Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia, EPFL (II), BBVA, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, Queens University of Charlotte. A special mention regarding arXiv: it is a very large and popular archive in Physics, Mathematics and Computer Sciences that is now feeding its Quantitative Finance content to RePEc.

Finally, here is the traditional list of thresholds passed during the last month:
25,000,000 cumulative working paper downloads
300,000 working papers
150,000 working papers with references
60,000 articles with references
1,000 journals

Leave a Comment » | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

On versioning in RePEc

August 21, 2009

RePEc carries research in various formats. While journal articles are unique (with very few exceptions), working papers, as they are pre-prints, may be duplicates of listed articles, and they may even appear in different versions, either because they are published in different series, or because there may be updates within a series. We believe that is important to carry all versions, not just the last one, for the following reasons.


  1. Time-stamps: A working paper allows to establish when some research was conducted and thus determines preeminence of research ideas. Given publication delays in Economics, this can be important.
  2. Open access: Many journal articles have gated access. Such restrictions can be bypassed by reading working papers, which are mostly open access.
  3. Link to published version: It is still preferred to use published versions in citations, especially once a paper is accepted in a journal. The originally cited working paper is often linked to its published version.
  4. Visibility: Working papers are much more read than journal articles, both because they are more current and they are freely available. In addition, working papers are disseminated through NEP.

The process of linking the various versions of the same work is not obvious, however. With about 800,000 works in RePEc, performing matches on titles is a daunting task, especially as fuzzy matching is necessary due to slight variations in punctuation and spelling. For this reason, we do the matching only across the works listed in an author’s profile. This ensures that the likelihood of two works being different versions of the same one to be very close to 100%. But this also means that such matching cannot be done for works where none of the authors is registered, or where a registered authors did not add all versions to the profile, thereby indicating he/she is not the author of this particular version, rightly of wrongly.

In some cases, titles change across versions, or journal editors require a title change. In such cases, a manual link between versions can be added, just contact a member of the RePEc team with the relevant RePEc handles.

4 Comments | RePEc features | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

EconPapers and LogEc on new hardware

August 12, 2009

Thanks to the continued support of the Swedish Business School at Örebro University, EconPapers and LogEc are now running on new and upgraded hardware. This will allow for the smooth running of these services over the next few years as the coverage of RePEc continues to grow and new features are added to the services.

EconPapers is a website that displays all the bibliographic data collected through RePEc. Contents can be browsed in various ways. A powerful search engine is also available. LogEc collects and displays statistics about abstract views and downloads from EconPapers and other participating RePEc services. Both EconPapers and LogEc are run by Sune Karlsson.

1 Comment | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in July 2009

August 4, 2009

The month of July is generally calm. Regular classes are not in session on campuses, researchers are on vacation or at conferences, thus it is to be expected that RePEc sees little new material or traffic. We counted 674,639 File downloads and 2,287,995 abstract views, relatively modest numbers, saw only six new archives: Universidad de los Andes, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (II), Spiru Haret University Brasov, Austrian Academy of Sciences, ETH Zürich (III), German Council for Social and Economic Data. The first added Venezuela to our list of participating countries, which is now at 68.

We still managed to pass a few thresholds:

400000 online articles
12500 listed book chapters
5000 subscribers to NEP-HIS, the largest subscriber base in NEP

Leave a Comment » | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Volunteer recognition: Bernardo Batiz-Lazo

July 31, 2009

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is a business historian with a deep interest in the dissemination of research. Quite naturally he became editor of NEP-HIS and quickly, in 2000, took the responsibility for the whole NEP project until 2007. He is still very much involved, still editing NEP-HIS, which is the mailing list with the most subscribers, at now over 5000. Occasionally, he has also edited other NEP reports on an interim basis.

Under Bernardo’s auspices, NEP grew tremendously. First, he made sure that every field of economics and some fields in business are covered by NEP. In principle now, every new working paper in RePEc should be picked up by at least one NEP report and announced by email and RSS. This required a substantial recruitment effort of new volunteer editors, complicated by the fact that new fields needed to be covered. Bernardo also worked hard to increase the subscriber base, not because it would increase revenue (there is none), but because of the network effects that make it more worthwhile to post papers on RePEc, and thus subscribe to NEP, etc.

While Bernardo retired from NEP leadership duties (taken over by Marco Novarese), he is still very active in the RePEc community, both in internal discussion and with NEP-HIS.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

About RePEc impact factors

July 27, 2009

Impact factors have always been a popular way to measure the influence of academic journals. They have been popularized by ISI, now part of Thomson. RePEc also provides impact factors, and this post is about explaining the differences between the two.

ISI takes a sample of journals and analyzes the citations across those journals. To be eligible, a citations has to appear within two years of the publication of the cited article, the cited article must be printed (not forthcoming, a working paper or a manuscript), and the cited article must be among the analyzed journals (286 in Economics). ISI is currently experimenting with a five year window, in addition to the existing two-year window.

RePEc considers all publications listed in its bibliographic database. Thus, it also considers other publication forms than journal articles: close to 1000 journals and 2600 working paper series. It imposes no time window, citations of any age qualify. In most cases, a citation of a working paper will count towards its published form once the article is included in RePEc, possibly after the original citation (condition: at least one author has both versions in his/her RePEc profile). This implies that working paper series and book series can also have impact factors. RePEc is thus more comprehensive.

However, the pool of citations RePEc is drawing from is different. It relies very much on working papers (who can later be published), as they are typically openly accessible. Some publishers also provide references in the bibliographic metadata, but not all. One implication of this is that RePEc is more current as it includes citations to and from research that is not yet published. As research gets published, this data gets updated. But as references from many journals are missing, RePEc citation data must still be treated as experimental. Whether these omissions matter remain to be seen. After all, impact factors always have to be considered in relative terms, not in absolute terms, and if omissions were not biased, they would not matter.

Another major difference is that RePEc excludes self-citations. This is an important issue as some journals, explicitly or implicitly, encourage authors to cite other articles published within the two year window in the same journal. Thus, just as self-citations are excluded for authors, they are excluded for journals. And this can matter a lot.

Finally, the impact factor is determined by divided the eligible citations by the number of eligible articles. ISI determines itself what articles are eligible for the denominator, and this can even be negotiated with the publisher. In RePEc’s case, if an article (or a working paper) is listed, it counts without adjustment.

RePEc also publishes variations on the “simple” impact factor: recursive impact factors, where every citation counts with the impact factor of the citing publication, this favors impact over numbers; discounted impact factors, where the impact of a citation decays with time (regardless of the age of the cited item; and a combination of the two, discounted recursive impact factors. Finally, there is now also the h-index. All variations have a different story to tell about the publication, and RePEc offers the reader the choice.

Leave a Comment » | Bibliographic features in RePEc, RePEc rankings | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Moving time is time to update RePEc data

July 19, 2009

Summer is when most academics move to new affiliations or responsibilities. It is thus a good time to detail what needs to be done for RePEc data to remain accurate. There are close to 30’000 contact details listed in RePEc, yet only 466 have expired email addresses. You can help keeping this list short.

Registered authors

If your email address changes, log in at the RePEc Author Service with your old address, then click on “Contact details” to amend your email address and any other contact details. Note: do not create a new account with your new email address. This would create a duplicate, and then links to and from your profile would disappear once the old account is deleted. Remember also to amend your affiliation(s) if necessary.

Note that starting next month, authors with obsolete email addresses will not count towards their affiliation’s ranking. This is under the assumption that if the email address is not valid anymore, it must be because they have moved.

RePEc archive and series maintainers

If your email address is changing, or if there is a new person in charge, amend your series and/or archive templates. These are the *seri.rdf and *arch.rdf files in the root of your archive. There is no need to email us, as we extract from your templates the addresses for the monthly emails. However, if your RePEc archive moves to a new location, we obviously need to know about it.

Editors

Editor data is provided at two locations: by the RePEc Author Service and by the relevant publishers. In the first case, an email address change is handled as for a registered author. If you are not an editor anymore (and your editorship is listed in your RePEc profile), you can remove this by logging in at the RePEc Author Service: click on “Research” then “identified”, check your old journal, and approve the removal. To add a journal you now edit to your RePEc profile, either look at the suggested research items (if your publisher put in your name in the RePEc data), or do a manual search with the journal title.

Your publisher may also provide directly your name and your email address to RePEc. Your can see this on the listing of your journal on EconPapers or IDEAS. There you see also a technical contact. This is where you need to email to request a change in the listing.

Leave a Comment » | Use of RePEc data | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

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