The RePEc Blog

The RePEc Genealogy is an academic family tree of economists. It provides information about where and when economists obtained their final degree, and who advised them for the final degree. At the time of this writing, over 12,000 economists are indexed in the RePEc Genealogy. The data is crowd-sourced, meaning that anybody with a RePEc account can amend records, much like Wikipedia.

Besides the curiosity factor of learning the background of economists, the assembled data is useful in several ways. One is that the data about the graduate programs is used to evaluate them. Close to 1000 are currently listed, and the research performance of their graduates is used to rank them. The data is also used by researchers for various analyses of the Economics profession.

As mentioned, the site is crowd-sourced. This tutorial shows how you can help in contributing to it (click on images for a larger view).

Logging in

Click on Make additions and changes in the side bar to get to the log-in page. This is the standard log-in procedure in RePEc and requires your RePEc Short-ID. If you do not know you Short-ID, follow this tutorial (new window).

Select a person to amend

Once logged in, you will be presented with this form:

Click on “yourself” to amend your Genealogy record. To amend someone else’s, you will need this person’s Short-ID. You likely do not know it. But if you enter parts of the name in the last field, options will be offered to you, like this:

Notice how there are several option, as there are several Richard Smith in RePEc. To ensure you have the right person, you can click on anyone’s link and it will open their IDEAS profile in a new window. Once you have the right person, enter their Short-ID in the first field and submit.

Amend a record

This is the standard form for data entry. Again, it all works with Short-IDs for people and RePEc handles for institutions. For institutions, one can either look up the handle (it always starts with RePEc:edi:) on the EDIRC directory of institutions, other enter a few letters (up to seven) relevant to the name of the institution, and a few choices will offered. Similarly, if one does not know the name of the advisor, enter the name and RePEc Short-IDs will be offered, if the person is registered. For example:

Gives you the following suggestions:

After entering the relevant handle and Short-ID, the form is completed:

Within 10 minutes the record will be created or amended on the live website. Buttons below the standard form allow you to amend further records, either by adding students that the person you just amended may have advised, or the advisor of this person, or anybody else, for examples other students who graduated from your program.

MyIDEAS has recently been improved, this is a good opportunity to show what it can do and how. This is a personalized service, thus it required credentials, unlike almost everything else in RePEc. We thus thus start with authentication, then look at how to populate one’s MyIDEAS account and then how to use it.

Logging in

Authentication is done through RePEc OpenID, which means that you need to have an account on the RePEc Author Service (but do not need to be an author) and know your RePEc Short-ID. You can find the latter in many ways: in your RePEc Author Service account, on your profile in IDEAS or EconPapers, or by using this look-up tool. See in the images below where the Short-ID pzi1 appears, including the address bar (click on any image to see it larger).

To log in, you will find a prompt for MyIDEAS almost everywhere on IDEAS, just below the top bar.

First, provide your RePEc Short-ID

Then log in with your RePEc Author Service credentials

Your are now ready. You will be logged out after an hour of inactivity.

Populating the MyIDEAS account

Go almost anywhere on IDEAS and you will see a button that allows you to save something to your MyIDEAS account. For example, here is a paper abstract page. You have now the option to save this paper, and you can thereby start building a bibliography. We will see later what this looks like in MyIDEAS.

If you click on the button, you get a confirmation.

You can also follow serials (working paper series, journals, for example), authors and JEL codes. Following means that whenever you go to your MyIDEAS account, you can see what has been added since the last time.

You can also follow keyword searches, a new feature. Do a search on IDEAS and add it to you MyIDEAS account. Note that you can refine your search with all the options offered on the advanced search page and they will be saved.

Using MyIDEAS

We have added a few items to the MyIDEAS account, let us see what we can do with them. Click on MyIDEAS and you get to the MyIDEAS “home”.

Let us look at the bibliography. By default all additions are put in folder “unassigned”. You can create additional folders and put the items in there.

Once you go into one of the folders, you can do several things with them, including sharing your folder with others, extracting all references in various formats, moving items to other folders.

Let us now move to the various thing you follow and start with authors. This tracks anything your followed authors have added to their profile since you added them to MyIDEAS or you refreshed the time stamp. Thus, for those you just added, nothing should be visible. For older ones, this should look like this:

Note that you can reset the timestamp so that the next time you visit, you will not see these items again. The same principle applies for series and JEL codes:

For the search keywords, they are no all listed on one single page because that could take a long time to load. You have to elect the keyword from the menu. Otherwise, the functionality of the page is similar.

End note

MyIDEAS is a relatively new service, so we are looking for ways to improve it. Suggestions are welcome. One that is planned is to allow for email notifications. And finally, there are other ways to keep abreast of what is new in RePEc, including the NEP reports.

Whether you are building a web page, writing a blog post, posting on Facebook or tweeting, as an economist engaged in discussing research on the field, you have to cite relevant sources. To do so, one is tempted to link directly to where said research is to be found: on a personal homepage, on a publisher’s website, or to the pdf file in a working paper series. I want to argue that this is not the best tactic. It is better to link to the abstract page for these research pieces on IDEAS or EconPapers. Why?

1. RePEc links are stable. Homepages disappear, publishers and institutions reorganize their websites, but RePEc services have committed to never change their URLs, as they are formed from persistent identifiers. And on the rare occasion that those change, IDEAS and EconPapers offer suggestions on the 404 page where to find the paper.
   
2. RePEc shows other versions. The reader may not be able to read the particular version of the paper that is linked to a gated website. RePEc services often offer alternative versions of the article such as a freely available working paper.
   
3. RePEc provides related literature. The abstract page offers links to referred and cited works, to author profiles, and other related material.
   
4. RePEc rewards linked authors. Getting cited on the Internet, even if it is with a popular blogger or a major newspaper, does not offer any quantifiable rewards to the authors. With a RePEc link, though, hits and downloads will counts towards authors rankings. Authors will be grateful for that.
   

NB: Linking to the URLs disseminated by NEP is fine, too, although only the last point is valid in that case.
PS: For blogs, the posts linking to RePEc abstract pages will be featured on EconAcademics.