How to optimize an institution’s ranking in RePEc

February 25, 2015

As we will very soon add a new institution ranking (voting on it will soon close. Edit: The new ranking is now live), it is a good opportunity to recap how institutions can optimize how they are getting ranked in RePEc. For the existing rankings, see here.


Get your authors listed, and with proper affiliations
The score of an institution is determined by the authors that declare being affiliated with in. If authors are not registered with the RePEc Author Service or have not declared the institution among their affiliation(s), we cannot count them towards the institutional ranking. Institutions can check who is registered by looking themselves up at EDIRC, RePEc’s institutional directory. Note that authors with several affiliations have to allocate percentages to each, and their scores are distributed according to those shares.
Get your authors to maintain their profiles
Authors are ranked as well, and whatever allows them to optimize their ranking scores works for their home institutions as well. You can follow this blog post on this topic.
Get your publications listed
This applies in particular to working papers. If the local working papers are indexed in RePEc, then local authors can add them to their profiles, and then only can they count towards the institution. Knowing that working papers are downloaded much more frequently than articles, this makes a difference. Also, if an article or book chpater is therwise not available, citations to them can still be captured if there is a working paper version available. Instructions on how to index publications in RePEc are here.
Link to those publications
As the various RePEc services provide listings for your working papers, you can link to them. Some even skip listing them on their website, linking only to RePEc. Two popular sites for that are EconPapers and IDEAS.
Have graduates listed as well
Through the RePEc Genealogy, departments can now list the graduates from their doctoral program. This matters because the performance of graduate programs is one of the factors in determining the rankings. Again, EDIRC has those alumni listed.


RePEc in January 2015

February 3, 2015

We are into a new year and have welcome our first new RePEc archives: New School for Social Research (II), Eurasian Academy of Sciences, Tokyo Center for Economic Research, Universitatea din Craiova, Association of Economic Universities of South and Eastern Europe and the Black Sea Region. We are now polling for a new institution ranking. Also, the RePEc Biblio now accepts reader suggestions for the listed topics, and topic editors can now decide to accept them in their listings of most relevant papers. We counted 523,396 file downloads and 2,195,639 abstract views, which brings us to the thresholds we passed:

1500000 cumulative software component downloads
800000 paper announcements through NEP
20000 book chapters available online


Poll about new RePEc institution ranking

January 26, 2015

The rankings provided by RePEc are becoming increasingly popular. They are far from perfect, though. One frequent criticism is that institution rankings depend on the size of the institution, as they simply add the scores of all affiliated economists. It is unfortunately not possible to offer per-capita rankings, as the registration system does not distinguish between faculty and students. What one could do, however, is to count only the top x people from every institution. The question is what this x should be.

We want to ask the RePEc community to determine this x with the poll below. The vote will be open for a month, the option closest to the median will be selected.

A few technicalities: As economists with multiple affiliations have to set shares for each, those shares will therefore also be used to determine who counts up to x. This means that more than x people will likely count towards the institution’s score. Also, institutions with fewer than x registered economists will not be compensated for the remainder of the allocation.


Enrichment facilities for papers readers

January 19, 2015

This post is the last in a series on the new enrichment facility on Socionet.

When you are logged into the Socionet system and browse a publication that is not one of yours, you will see close to the bottom of the page the following three menus

The first one allows readers, if they are registered authors with publications linked to their personal profiles, to check a paper from the list of own claimed papers and select a taxonomy value at the drop-down list “Relationship type” in such a form

For this use case we support a taxonomy of recommendations or just useful comments that can be provided by a reader  to the author of the browsed paper based on a content of some publication of the reader. The taxonomy has following values:

You can apply software that I used
Your results are analysed in my publication
Your idea/method/model/results are itemized in my publication
Your data/method/model/results are illustrated in my publication
Your results are interpreted in my publication
My data/method/model are better
Your idea/method/model/results are generalized in my publication
A similar problem is discussed in my publication
Your results are refuted in my publication
I received the same results
Your idea/method/model are implemented in my work
Your errors are detected and corrected in my publication

The second menu is called the “Scientific developments and associations with this publications“. It opens the same form. The taxonomy in this case allows a user to specify the development and complement relationships between a user paper and the currently browsed paper. This taxonomy has been already used in some other use cases and has following values:

uses data from
uses method from
uses a model from
uses software from
uses statistics from
details idea/method/model from
generalizes idea/method/model from
implements idea/method/model from
analyzes results from
illustrates results from
interprets results from
corrects errors in
refines results from
refutes results from
develops results from

The third menu option is called the “Professional opinion on this publication“. It allows readers sharing with the community their opinions about the browsed paper. It opens the same form and provides the same taxonomy as described for the use case of the annotating paper’s abstract. But in this case a user does not need to select a text fragment within an a paper’s abstract to open the form.


A new ecosystem for authors of research papers in RePEc

January 12, 2015

This post is part of a series about the new enrichment facility at Socionet.

RePEc users can use now some new tools and services, which forms together following ecosystem:

A. If a user is logged into the Socionet system, which processes whole RePEc dataset, the user can create different types of semantic linkages between papers, personal profiles, etc. This new users’ facility is illustrated by following main use cases:

1. A user can specify the roles of their co-authorship in the making of a collective paper.

2. A user can annotate text fragments of a paper’s abstract to provide readers with additional and/or newer information on the topic.

3. A user can link their papers together, e.g. to provide information about its open access or newest versions; and to show to readers an evolution of ideas or a development of approaches through a set of own papers.

4. A user can contribute data on how the works referenced in their paper are used.

5. A user can share their professional opinion, or make recommendations, comments  about relationships between their papers and the one that is currently browsed.

B. All user-created outgoing and ingoing semantic linkages are visualized on the paper page together with initial metadata of the paper.

C. All created semantic linkages are processed by the Socionet system on the everyday base to collect statistical data and to build different scientometric indicators. For personal and organizational profiles the statistics are aggregated by links between OrgUnit <-> Person <-> Paper. Such indicators are available for every paper (example), personal (example) or organizational (example) profile. And also for every RePEc archive and series.

D. The community of RePEc user can create new and develop already existed taxonomy of scientific relationships which are used in tools to create semantic linkages. The same they can propose new use cases of using this technique over RePEc dataset. Please send such proposals to me or leave it in comments.

E. The registered users can switch on the e-mail notification service, which will inform them when someone creates/modifies a semantic linkage with their papers, or when someone is changing papers that the user linked together, and so on.

F. Developers of RePEc services can harvest and use the data of all created semantic linkages. The data are freely available by three ways: 1) by FTP from the Socionet server; 2) by OAI-PMH protocol with CERIF output format; 3) by REST API in XML form.


RePEc in December 2014, and a look back at 2014

January 6, 2015

Let us first discuss what is new from last month. First, IDEAS changed its website layout to be more friendly for our users on mobile users. Other RePEc websites will soon follow suit. Second, the NEP-CWA (Central and Western Asia) has been revived. And third, we welcome the following new RePEc archives: University of Tennessee, KSP Journals, Davidson College, Instytut Badañ Strukturalnych, Montana State University, Institute of Agroecology and Environmental Management. For the set of RePEc services that share such statistics, we counted 497,673 file downloads and 1,901,689 abstract views in December 2014.

This all helped us pass the following thresholds last month:

1700000 items listed in RePEc
600000 items with extracted and matched references
500000 working papers with abstracts
400000 cited articles
300000 working papers with JEL codes
1750 participating archives
1000 followers on NEP twitter feeds

Now, what have we acheived in 2014? For one, our archive maintainers (of which there are 122 more) have added a ton of material: over 200’000 works, or an increase of 14%. While 54’000 working papers and 220 new series were added, the big push came from journals with 266 new journals and almost 150’000 new articles indexed in RePEc. Over 4’000 authors are newly registered. We counted 25 million abstract views and over 6 million downloads. The RePEc team has also worked hard to improve the user experiences, making the website more accessible for mobile devices as well as secure, and adding many features: NEP reports are now available through Twitter, CitEc added many new features, and we are now working with the Replication Wiki.

While in some ways one can consider RePEc to be a mature project, it dates back to 1997 in its current form, it is still surprising how much growth it is experiencing. And there is still a lot of potential, especially in terms of enhancing the information disseminated by RePEc. We will see more of that over the next year.


IDEAS website now mobile friendly

December 30, 2014

As more and more people are using phones and tablets to surf the web and in particular to consult the RePEc websites, IDEAS has just moved to a new layout that is more friendly to such devices. Specifically, the display adjusts to the size of the browser window. We hope this will make it easier for our numerous mobile users. Other RePEc websites will follow.

Note that some IDEAS pages will still show the old layout. It takes some time to convert 2 million pages. If anything looks amiss, contact us! Or visit us at the ASSA 2015 meeting in Boston, at the St. Louis Fed booth in the exhibitor hall.


How to contribute motives for using papers from your papers’ reference lists

December 22, 2014

This post is part of an ongoing series on the enrichment facility at Socionet.

The Socionet system uses the CitEc data about citations and similar internal data. When the citation data for a paper is available, Socionet displays a reference list for the currently browsed paper. The list is limited to publications that are available at RePEc or at Socionet. This list may look like this

In the list there may be two sections: a) referenced papers claimed as own by author(s) of this paper; b) papers of other authors or unclaimed papers.

If you are logged into the system and browsed one of your papers, on the right you will see a link “[+]” for each reference. This link opens the form to specify your motives of using the paper you referenced

This form is the same as in other enrichment use cases. The difference is the taxonomy available for you in the “Relationship type” drop-down menu. For this specific use case the taxonomy supports relationships of development and complement between two papers, which was used in the papers’ abstract annotation use case and has following values:

uses data from
uses method from
uses a model from
uses software from
uses statistics from
details idea/method/model from
generalizes idea/method/model from
implements idea/method/model from
analyzes results from
illustrates results from
interprets results from
corrects errors in
refines results from
refutes results from
develops results from

After making such enrichment the reference list of a publication may look for readers like this

The data added  by the author about citation motivations is highlighted by yellow-color background as seen above. Pointing a mouse on it, you may see a pop-up comment if it was provided. The link allows viewing detailed data about the linkage that was created in this case.


How to link your papers together

December 15, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series on the new enrichment facility at Socionet.

If you logged into the Socionet system and browse your own papers, you will see to the right of the paper’s full text link the text: “Create a link to a related paper of yours?”

Or if your paper’s metadata does not have a full text link, you will see this

If you click on this menu the following form for the linkage creation will open

In this form under the field “Comments” you will see a list of all your claimed publications (on the example above – my list of publications). You have to check one of your publications in this list that has a relationship to another of your papers currently opened in a browser. Then you have to select a specific type of the relation between these two papers from the drop-down list the “Relationship type“. Optionally you can also enter some comments. To end the linkage creation press the “Save” button.

Currently we provide two taxonomy classes for selecting a relationship type between papers belonged to the same author.

One of these taxonomy supports following types of linkages among versions and components of a research publication:

author’s version (manuscript) for
open access version for
version with slight changes for
version with minor changes for
substantially revised version for
revised or new version for
duplicated copy for
presentation of
part of
abstract for
table of contents for
foreword for
bibliography for

The four last values listed above (starting with the “abstract for”) intend for supporting the emerging practice of sharing with the community “units of thought”, e.g. research artifacts, micro-publications, nano-publications, etc.

The second taxonomy supports relationship types of development and complement between research outputs like these:

uses data from
uses method from
uses a model from
uses software from
uses statistics from
details idea/method/model from
generalizes idea/method/model from
implements idea/method/model from
analyzes results from
illustrates results from
interprets results from
corrects errors in
refines results from
refutes results from
develops results from

Linkages you create are visualized on web pages of both linked papers’ metadata as additional information and in a form of a navigation graph of linkages.


Annotating of papers’ abstract

December 8, 2014

This post is part of a continuing series on the new enrichment facility at Socionet.

After logging into the Socionet system you can annotate the abstract (if it is present) on any paper available at RePEc or Socionet. You can, however, not create a new abstract. The annotated paper’s abstract may look like this

The annotated fragment of the abstract highlighted by yellow background color are made by the author. If a non-author creates an annotation the annotated text will be on a pink background. The text of an annotation is a pop-up. It appears if you point your mouse on the annotated text fragment. All annotations on the paper are listed at the right with links to detailed views of the annotation data.

If you want to create a new annotation just select a text fragment within an abstract of a paper. You will see an icon to open a form to create an annotation. This form looks very much the same as shown and described in the previous note.

There is only one difference. If you are  the author of the paper whose abstract you are annotating you will have in the drop-down list “Relationship type” only the value “no relationship“. But if you are annotating the paper is not yours, in this list you will have a taxonomy called “Professional opinions and evaluation”.

We provide the following set of initial values for this taxonomy:

responds positively to
innovative result
very interesting result
turning point for the science development
best, most relevant on the subject
responds negatively to
unscientific approach
potentially dangerous effect
result based on confusion
suspected plagiarism

From technical point of view all created annotations exist in the Socionet system as semantic linkages (see the example), where the source object of the linkage is the personal profile of the linkage’s author, the target object is the paper which abstract is annotated and the semantic of the linkage is a value from the listed above taxonomy or the “no relationship” value.