The RePEc Blog

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.

We had a first last month: not a single new RePEc archive. Does this mean that every working paper provider and every publisher is now participating in RePEc? We do not believe so and hope to see many more onboard. Still, we got good traffic, with 476,515 file downloads and 1,878,675 abstract views in October 2022. And we reached the following major milestone:

400,000,000 cumulative abstract views on IDEAS

You may read the title of this blog and think, “Elementary.” Before making that assumption based on years of experience creating PDFs for sharing papers, take a moment to consider the notion of a good PDF. Despite its namesake of Portable Document Format, PDF isn’t fully portable. The look and feel, and sometimes even meaning of a document won’t transfer across operating systems unless fully self-contained in the file. For instance, unless native to the system rendering a font, a different font will render. For example, a document created with ITC Symbol Medium, a proprietary TrueType font may render differently between PDF viewers, losing the intended meaning. Let’s avoid this embarrassing mishap and create a good PDF.

Page from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 1999 Annual Report, rendered in Firefox v.103.0.1 PDF viewer. Text appears in Latin script and characters are spaced appropriately.

Page from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 1999 Annual Report, rendered with PDF.js iframe v.2.9.359. Text appears in Greek rather than Latin script and characters are spaced appropriately.

Page from Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 1999 Annual Report, rendered with Preview v.11.0 (used on MacOS). Text appears in Latin script and characters are spaced far apart.

A short history of PDF

What is PDF? In 1991, John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Inc. ideated a universal format to communicate visually meaningful information across operating systems. Adobe realized this technology in 1992 as the Portable Document Format, or PDF. In 2008, Adobe’s proprietary file format was standardized as ISO 32000 and is based on PDF v. 1.4. The latest version of ISO 32000 was released in 2020 and details PDF v. 2.0. PDFs are electronic documents that are either digitized or born digital—i.e., digital surrogates of a physical document or documents created with a digital editing software, respectively.

​Key components

1. Portable look and feel between operating systems—inherent to PDF
2. Embedded structure and semantics—enabled with Tagged PDF
3. Fully self-contained—defined by PDF/A

The world of PDF is vast. For the purpose of this post, we’re thinking about PDF as a format for disseminating born digital scholarly papers, and a good PDF is understood as one that is accessible and self-contained.

About the Good PDF

In addition to the standard PDF, there are PDF extensions or subsets, including PDF/E, PDF/VT, PDF/X, PDF/UA, and PDF/A. PDF/E, PDF/VT, and PDF/X specify requirements that optimize publishing and printing and are largely focused on handling complex graphics and layout, whereas PDF/UA and PDF/A are more generalized to any type of content and focus on how that content exists and is presented in the PDF. Standardized in 2012 as ISO 14289, PDF/UA is a “Universally Accessible” PDF variant that requires content blocks to be tagged, making them navigable for screenreaders. Tagged PDF defines structure and semantics so that the content is not only machine readable, the order of content is meaningful. PDF/A or PDF-Archival is standardized in ISO 19005 as a format for long-term preservation of electronic documents. PDF/A is defined in four versions, as well as three levels of conformance to those versions. Together, the versions and conformance levels are flavors of PDF/A. These flavors do not suggest preference; they are simply variants that provision different levels of flexibility as to what can or cannot be contained within the file. In addition to content tagging, PDF/A limits the types of content—or objects—that can be included in a PDF.

​As aforementioned, in the world of PDF, there are two types of documents: digitized and born digital. Asserting tagging on digitized documents requires manual tagging of the file that is time consuming and often not possible due to the nature of how documents are digitized. As such, digitized documents generally forgo the tagged PDF requirement, taking the PDF/A-b (basic) conformance level that does not require tagging. This is an inherent vice of print material. Born digital content, however, can easily be tagged, as meaningful structure is built into word processing software and can be understood by PDF creation software. When possible, born digital documents should conform to PDF/A-a (accessible).

​Now that you’ve decided on the conformance level, what version should you use? Subsequent versions of ISO 19005 consider the evolution of documents and standards. For example. PDF/A-1 does not permit embedding of certain image and content objects, including JPEG2000 and 3D images, and CAD drawings. These embedded objects are permitted in later versions of 19005 as standardization, support, and uptake around those previously prohibited types of content increased. Repositories prefer and may prohibit later versions of PDF/A because they are more flexible and, thus, have been considered less preservation-friendly.

How to create a Good PDF

​Considering the type of content and your born digital file, PDF/A-1a (version 1, accessible) is the preferred PDF/A flavor for working papers. However, due to the landscape of version preference and software support PDF/A-1b (version 1, basic) may be the only possible version to achieve, as not all software support tagged PDF, and adding that structure would need to be done with a PDF creation software.

​Word processing software, such LaTeX, Microsoft Word, and LibreOffice, have built-in functions that create PDF derivatives from the native file format—i.e., .docx, .tex, and other word processed formats. Additional steps are needed to create a PDF/A, and listed are some guides for creating your PDF/A-1a or -1b.

LaTeX

• pdfx: Package for creating PDF/A for pdfTeX, XeTeX, LaTeX
• Creating high-quality PDF/A documents using LaTeX: Guidelines for creating PDF/A-1b
• Creating PDF/A and PDF/X Files: Overleaf: Guidelines for creating PDF/A-1b
• How to create a PDF/A file with LaTex: Guidelines for creating PDF/A

Microsoft Word

• Converting Files to PDF/A Format (pdf): Guide for creating PDF/A-1a

LibreOffice

• Create PDF/A document with LibreOffice: Guide for creating PDF/A-1a

Because software and software uptake changes, there is no universal guide for creating a PDF/A. These guides should send you in the right direction. While software may create a seemingly good PDF/A, you can complete manual and automated validate to ensure that your PDF/A is compliant.

Validation software

• veraPDF: Open source validation software
• Analyzing documents with the Preflight tool (Acrobat Pro): Proprietary validation software
• Correcting problem areas with the Preflight tool (Acrobat Pro): Guide to resolve validation errors with proprietary validation software

Manual checklist

• Is meaningful descriptive metadata embedded?
• Did fonts embed as expected or are there visual discrepancies?
• Is the content ordered correctly so that the document can be read by a screenreader?

Next steps

Create a good PDF and be a steward of accessible and sustainable research dissemination throughout the working paper lifecycle.

Further reading

​Oettler, A. (2013). PDF/A in a Nutshell 2.0. PDF Association. https://www.pdfa.org/resource/pdfa-in-a-nutshell-2-0/

25 years ago in September 1997, IDEAS was launched. That was celebrated last month with a special cake. In other news, we counted 414,537 file downloads and 1,698,145 abstract views for the month, welcomed Società Italiana di Economia dello Sviluppo and University of Bremen as newly participating RePEc archive, and reached the following milestones:

1,200,000 articles with citations
1,800,000 items with citations
1,000,000 new working paper announcements distributed through NEP (a paper may be announced through several reports)
60,000 indexed books