Last month, we welcomed the following new participating archives: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, European Microfinance Network, Bank Indonesia, Mendel University Press, Bangor University, Economic History Society. We counted 382,881 file downloads and 1,549,190 abstract views through EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP, and Socionet. And we reached the following milestones:
5,000,000 cumulative abstract views for book chapters
2,000,000 items with abstracts
12,500 Twitter followers for NEP reports
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
RePEc is a uniquely organized initiative that brings with it an alphabet soup that confuses a lot of people, and we cannot blame them. Is a paper listed on IDEAS or RePEc? How is NEP different from RePEc? What is the difference between IDEAS and EconPapers? Etc.
For starters, RePEc (Research Papers in Economics, hence the capitalization) is a way to organize the data about publications of all sorts in Economics, and make all that available. Note that there is no central database, as every contributing publishers makes the data available on its own website following the rules set by RePEc. Beyond those rules, RePEc only maintains the list of pointers to where the publishers have put their RePEc archives.
Then, basically anybody can come and use that data. Some have decided to do that more formally and have their service listed in the repec.org domain. Examples would be EconPapers, IDEAS, and NEP. Others prefer not to or integrate the data in a larger scheme that spans more fields. Examples are Econlit, WorldCat, EBSCO, Google Scholar or ResearchGate. A third type of service uses part of RePEc data to enhance it and feed it back to RePEc. Examples for that are CitEc, EDIRC, and the RePEc Author Service. For a full list of the RePEc services that we know of, see the RePEc site.
Thus, RePEc is the basis for these services, to varying degrees, but they are independently run and RePEc has no say how they should be run. In fact, RePEc is not even a formal organization. Thus IDEAS is using RePEc data just as EconPapers is using RePEc data, but they are in no way directed by RePEc. And, the big difference between IDEAS and EconPapers is that they were initiated by different people. In the spirit of healthy competition, use the one you prefer.
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
New for users of RePEc data: A R package to leverage the RePEc API is now available in CRAN. A first of sorts is that we welcomed just one new RePEc archive, Knowledge Press. We counted 323,544 file downloads and 1,450,521 abstract views through EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP, and Socionet. And we hit the following milestones last month:
2,500,000 works available online
1,200,000 article abstracts
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
Acknowledging that we are awfully late for posting about what happened for RePEc last month, we have still be busy behind the scenes. The next monthly report should show a few innovations. In the meanwhile, we welcome the following new participating archives: Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), Hindawi Publishing, Leibniz Universität Hannover, International Society for projects in Education and Research, Bentham Open. We counted 331,999 file downloads and 1,398,211 abstract views (with the added fact that over 99% of traffic on IDEAS was from robots. You can use the API). Finally, we reached the following milestones last month.
1,750,000 listed articles
2,000 followers on Twitter for @repec_org
1,000 followers on Twitter for @repecCitEc
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
Last month, we had an unusual number of new participating archives: Sumerianz Publication, Association For The Study of the Cuban Economy, Warmia and Mazury University, Kardan University, Infrastructure Victoria, Escuela de Postgrado GERENS, Economic Research Institute of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, King Abdulaziz University, Bank of Israel, Tourism Research Institute. We have also counted 357,786 file downloads and 1,497,660 abstract views from the RePEc services that provide such statistics. And finally, we passed the following milestones:
1,700,000 listed journal articles
80,000 NEP email subscriptions
1,250 authors with a registered Twitter handle
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
The big news are that we have now extracted references from 1 million works and that we welcomed the 2000th RePEc archive. For a complete list of archives, see here. Last month we welcomed the following ones: University of Bern (II), Baltija Publishing, Journal of Academic Finance, Journal of Behavioral Public Administration. We counted 469,422 file downloads and 1,791,209 abstract views.
And here is the list of milestones for the month:
2,400,000 works available online
1,000,000 works with extracted references
50,000 indexed book chapters
2,000 participating archives
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
With the recent addition of an archive at the University of Berne (Switzerland), RePEc reached a major milestone with 2000 contributing archives opened since inception in 1997. Indeed, publishers index their content in RePEc by opening a so-called RePEc archive, which is located on a server they manage and that contains all the metadata necessary for their publications to be visible on the various RePEc services. This means that RePEc is not a web spider: publishers submit their publications to RePEc.
RePEc archives come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some are managed by the major commercial publishers. Others are maintained by small research centers striving to get their output known to the world. Some use dedicated servers, others place their RePEc archive as part of their website. There are also some aggregators that relay the metadata from several institutions or publishers.
All in all, over 2.6 million items of research are indexed from over 8,000 serials, including over 3,000 journals. To see the current list of RePEc archives, click here, and to find instructions to open a RePEc archive, click here.
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
Last month’s slate of new RePEc archives is: Fordham University, US Department of Treasury, Online Academic Press, ARPHA, Research Consulting and Development (Kyiv), and Office of Health Economics. We counted 424,289 file downloads and 1,869,578 abstract views from participating RePEc Services. We opened a new NEP Report: NEP-ISF (Islamic Finance). And we passed the following milestones:
2,600,000 indexed items
10,000 NEP Twitter followers
100 NEP reports opened since inception
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
Beyond the open bibliography that lays the foundation of RePEc, various services have emerged that enhance the data collected with RePEc. One of them is the RePEc Genealogy. The goal of this initiative is to build an academic family tree for Economics, recording who was advised by whom, where and when. It thus tries to build links among the over 50,000 economists registered with the RePEc Author Service as well as the institutions listed in EDIRC. At the time of writing this, close to 13,000 economists from over 1000 programs are listed in the RePEc Genealogy.
The data is collected by the community: The RePEc Genealogy is a wiki, and all you need is a registration with the RePEc Author Service to add information to it. You can make sure your own record is complete, add your students or whose of your advisor, or ensure that your graduate program or alma mater are properly recorded. Over 3,000 economists have already contributed to it. Go to the RePEc Genealogy crowdsourcing tool to participate and see some statistics about the genealogy.
How is the collected data used? Of course, one can browse the site for information. But the data is also used in other ways: IDEAS uses it to complement author profiles, to compute rankings of graduate programs (publications from all years or last 10 years), a ranking of economist by graduation cohorts. Finally, data from the Genealogy is starting to be used for research, along with data from the rest of RePEc. You could be part of the data that you are analysing! For a listing of papers using RePEc data, see here.
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
In March, we welcomed a diverse set of new participating archives: Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Finance Think (Macedonia) and Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis. WE counted 507,929 file downloads and 2,025,384 abstract views through EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP and Socionet. And we reached the following milestones:
20,000,000 downloads through EconPapers
700,000 working papers available for download
500,000 articles with extracted references
10,000 NEP report followers on Twitter
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
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