MyIDEAS: your personal space on IDEAS

January 25, 2013

We are proud to introduce an important new feature to the IDEAS website. MyIDEAS is a personal space for the IDEAS user where she can save the papers and articles found on the site and organize them into folders. Think of it like navigating an online store and selecting items for purchase. The difference is that your “cart” is a list of references that you can sort at will into categories you can name.

In addition, MyIDEAS allows you to follow additions to JEL codes, series and journals, as well as what authors may have added to their RePEc profiles.

To use this new service, authentication is necessary, which happens like for others services through an account in the RePEc Author Service, Once cleared, the user finds on all relevant IDEAS pages the option to “add” or “follow” the displayed person or item. This works thanks to a cookie whose sole purpose is to identify the user as he navigates the site. It does, however, not track the user. Contents of the MyIDEAS accounts remain entirely private.

We hope users will find this service useful and welcome comments for improvements or new features.

Update (January 26): Following several requests, two features have been added: one can put annotations on one’s bibliographics listings, and the latter can be exported in various formats.

2 Comments | Bibliographic features in RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in December 2012, and a look back at 2012

January 2, 2013

Over the past month, we welcomed new archives from the following institutions: Université Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Associazione Studi e Ricerche Interdisciplinari sul Lavoro, Feng Chia University, Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. RePEc services served 2,235,346 abstract views and 554,912 full-text downloads over the course of the month. And we managed to pass the following thresholds:

800000 research items listed in registered author profiles
250000 working papers with extracted references
150000 articles with extracted references
1500 participating archives

A few additional words about 2013. Over the past year, we counted 26,409,738 abstract views and 7,004,655 full-text downloads through RePEc services participating in the bean counting, IDEAS served 11,473,203 unique visitors from 226 countries and territories (including 3 visits from Nauru, 7 from Saint Pierre and Miquelon, but none this year from North Korea, contrarily to previous years). RePEc added 112 new participating archives, 297 working paper series, 180 journals, 53,731 working papers, 113,336 articles, and a total of 163,479 new items available online. 3,769 authors registered, 4,141 NEP reports were issued, references were extracted and matched from 112,389 works. Beyond this, IDEAS and EDIRC went through a redesign, EconAcademics.org was relaunched as a blog aggregator for economics research, the CollEc co-authorship analysis site was opened to the public, new features were added to the RePEc Author Service and CitEc, our citation analysis site, and the RePEc Genealogy was introduced. And there are plenty of plans for 2013!

2 Comments | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Cloud computing and RePEc

December 13, 2012

Hosting RePEc services has been both a technical and an organizational challenge. Historically, the first hosting of what was to become RePEc goes back to late 1992. Manchester Computing Center, as it was known then, agreed to create WAIS indexed Gopher for the BibEc and WoPEc projects created by Thomas Krichel. The site was converted to the web in 1993. Manchester Computing Center were a national center for academic computing, providing services the UK academic community. They were fortunately forward-looking in their outlook when they started to with NetEc. It was broadly within their remit as Thomas Krichel worked in UK academia at the time. They continued to sponsor RePEc-related sites until the end of the decade. But they were not the only one. Washington University of St. Louis, where EconWPA was living, contributed a NetEc mirror, and so did Hitotsubashi University where Satoshi Yasuda kept as server in his documentation centre for Japanese economic statistics. So generally, it was for sponsoring institutions, where a RePEc volunteer lived to take up the hosting. If they agreed, there were usually stringent conditions. Machines are locked in a facility closed after hours, there are rules on firewalls. Or when the machine was based in somebody’s office, a cleaner could unplug a cable, electricity cuts could cause damage to the motherboard, failing air conditioning would damage disks. The list may look comical now, but at the time each incident was a disaster. There was not much of an alternative. Commercial solutions were too expensive to be paid for by an individual, and project funding would come to an end.

Things are looking better now. Cloud computing has become much cheaper. In 2006, the RePEc OAI gateway, sponsored by the Central Library of Economics (ZBW) in Germany was the first sponsored RePEc service. The CollEc service has become the second sponsored RePEc service. The server runs at a hosting company. The server is a dedicated machine, with 8 CPUs. They are running 100% constantly as the calculations for CollEc are very heavy, at this time. One single sponsor covers a 50 euros a month fee for the machine. In November 2012 the ZBW sponsorship moved to a similar machine. In December 2012, the NEP service followed. It uses a similar machine. The NEP team had several offers of sponsorship and chose the one by Victoria University of Wellington, mainly because they were the first to offer. We think the CitEc service will follow suit, but we still have to find a sponsor. We also could move the main RePEc site to a similar machine. While a single site may not require the use of a powerful computer we still need backup. Case in point, in 2008 staff at the hosting company discovered that the server sponsored by ZBW did not have a stick on it. They proceeded to dismantle the machine. No data was recoverable. Fortunately Thomas Krichel kept a backup.

We expect that RePEc will be using more sponsored hosting. It is a very good thing. RePEc volunteers have spent countless hours on broken disks, falling power supply systems, loose network cable than you can shake a stick at. Using sponsored hosting can leave more time to improve service.

Leave a Comment » | RePEc volunteers, Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Thomas Krichel

RePEc in November 2012

December 4, 2012

The number of the month is 50 million. This is the number of downloads that IDEAS has facilitated since inception. And it is the number of abstract views on EconPapers since its creation. These numbers were compiled by LogEc, which weeds out a considerable numbers of illegitimate downloads and abstract views, for example due to duplicates or spiders. For reporting RePEc services, LogEc reported last month 654,809 file downloads and 2,696,554 abstract views.

We have welcomed the following institutions into RePEc: Institutul National de Statistica şi Studii Economice, CEMLA, Società Italiana di Economia Demografia e Statistica, Fucape Business School, Fundatia Amfiteatru, Voice of Research, Université de Franche-Comté, Institut national d’étude démographiques.

All the thresholds that have been reached in the past month are:

50000000 cumulative downloads on IDEAS
50000000 cumulative abstract views on EconPapers
1300000 listed documents
400000 working paper abstracts
400000 items with references
250000 cited articles
6000 listed institutions with a published author
2500 Wikipedia links to research in RePEc

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

RePEc at ASSA 2013 in San Diego

November 28, 2012

After three years, RePEc will again be present in the exhibitors hall of the Allied Social Sciences Associations (ASSA) meeting in San Diego 4-6 January 2013. While in Atlanta we had an isolated booth in the back with just a table and some simple printouts as backdrop, this time the booth will be more appealing to visitors. Indeed, RePEc will be part of the double booth of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (booths 315 and 317). The St. Louis Fed is there to promote its publications and its powerful database and graphing facility for economic data, FRED. The RePEc corner will be available to answer questions from users, provide demonstrations of RePEc features and welcome feedback. And there may be a gift for visitors…

Leave a Comment » | Temporary RePEc announcements | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

News about EDIRC, the index of economics institutions

November 21, 2012

EDIRC is an index of economics departments, institutes and research centers created in 1995 that has been feeding RePEc with data about such institutions. But beyond just a listing of institutions, it has evolved into an information source of its own right. Currently, it has the following additional features:


  • Links to journals or working paper series published by the respective institutions and indexed in RePEc.
  • Listings of all people affiliated with the respective institutions and registered with the RePEc Author Service.
  • For these people, a link to a compilation of all their publications.
  • A recent add-on is a listing of all alumni (final degree) as found on the RePEc Genealogy.
  • For the alumni as well, a link to a compilation of their publications.

With close to 13,000 listed institutions, EDIRC has grown a lot since its start. After all those years, the database will now go through some gradual changes, among which are:


  • New categories: the current ones were designed when there were only a few hundred listed institutions.
  • About 12% of the links are known to be invalid. They are currently being systematically checked for better addresses, but this will take several months.
  • Institutions that are known to be defunct and that have no links to people or publications will be removed.
  • When possible, chairs and similar “micro-institutions” will be consolidated. They change too frequently and have become a maintenance burden with no significant benefit. This pertains particularly to Germanic universities.
  • An effort is currently being made to add translations of institution names to English wherever possible. Indeed, it appears that even natives users search for the English name.
  • Speaking of search, the search engine will be improved to make searches more intuitive and efficient than is currently the case.

Of course, any help is always appreciated. In particular, if you notice a bad link, a valid one is always appreciated. And you will be credited along with all the other contributors.

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

RePEc in October 2012

November 3, 2012

What happened with RePEc last month? First, like every October, institutions are at the Fall peak in producing research, as over 20,000 items have been added to RePEc. Second, our new project, the RePEc Genealogy, is off to a good start, with already over 4000 authors listed. Then, we counted 634,377 downloads and 2,462,684 abstract views through participating services. Finally, we welcomed the following new participating archives: University of Notre Dame, Yonsei University, ZenTra Center for Transnational Studies, Asian Academy of Management, Urban Institute, WWWforEurope, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Università di Napoli “Parthenope”, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, Moscow State University, Shandong University, Regia Naţională a Pădurilor, and Universität Zürich (III)

We reached the following thresholds:
10000000 references extracted
4000000 references matched with material listed in RePEc
2000000 cumulative book abstract views
700000 articles available online
25000 authors linked in CollEc co-authorship network
10% of registered authors listed in RePEc Genealogy

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

About Open Access

October 26, 2012

This week is Open Access Week, created to raise awareness about the possibility that research can be accessible for free and this can be viable economic model. In some way, RePEc has always been part of the Open Access movement. It tries to improve the dissemination of research in Economics, not by publishing said research, but by democratizing its discoverability both for the author and the reader. There are various ways in which RePEc helps Open Access, and also in which Open Access helps RePEc.

RePEc was initiated to disseminate working papers, which are pre-prints that emerged due to the horrendous publication lags economics enjoys. While working papers were initially distributed in the print format, it is now standard to find them online, and with only very few exceptions, they are not behind a pay-wall. As RePEc tries to match working papers with their published article versions, a reader frustrated by a pay-wall for an article can often find an alternative Open Access version.

Note that even when authors are not in an institution with a participating RePEc archive, they can still get their works indexed in RePEc by uploading them to MPRA, as long as they satisfy their publisher’s copyright. For a handy list of what individual publishers allow, see SHERPA/RoMEO. This list also shows that it is very rare for a publisher to require that one has to withdraw a working paper upon journal publication. In such cases, we strongly recommend not to remove it from RePEc, but rather to remove the link to the pdf only (and certainly not to remove the paper from the author profile).

RePEc also helps promote Open Access journals. Those are usually young and do not (yet) enjoy the reputation of their older, gated peers. At RePEc, every article is on the same footing and we let the market decide what people find interesting or citable. In fact, we find that material that is available in Open Access is downloaded 73% more frequently than gated material, and in the latter case there may also be quite a few failed downloads as we can only count clicks, not their success.

Open Access also helps RePEc, foremost by allowing us to download the research material for citation analysis. Indeed, if publishers do not provide us access to their reference lists in one way or another, we cannot count citations. Users may now help us in this regard, but all these efforts would not be necessary if the pdfs were freely available.

And if you are interested in bringing a journal to Open Access, do not hesitate to contact the author of this post. We can help in giving this journal visibility and find the right partners to make the move or the birth easy.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in September 2012

October 4, 2012

This was an unusually busy month for RePEc. First, we unveiled various improvements to CitEc, our citation analysis initiative. Then, we launched the RePEc Genealogy, which traces through crowd-sourcing the academics family tree in economics. Almost 400 authors joined the RePEc Author Service, a pace that amazingly does not seem to slow down despite covering over 33000 published authors. And the following institutions joined RePEc with an archive: Alliance of Central-Eastern European Universities, University of Ghent, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini, Università di Salerno, Vita e Pensiero, University of Bucharest, Australian Treasury.

And now the thresholds that have been reached during last month:
1250000 items indexed in RePEc
750000 articles indexed in RePEc
125000 articles with references
5000 RePEc items mentioned in blog posts on EconAcademics.org
5000 blog posts indexed on EconAcademics.org
600 blogs with links captured on EconAcademics.org

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

Introducing the RePEc Genealogy

September 28, 2012

A new RePEc service is born, the RePEc Genealogy, which collects and displays the academic family tree for economics. This is a crowd-sourced initiative, which means that any person registered with the RePEc Author Service can contribute information about oneself and others: institution and year where the terminal degree was obtained, advisor, and possibly students.

The collected data will be used in various ways. Currently, author profiles on IDEAS link back to relevant genealogy pages. The directory of institutions, EDIRC, has lists of alumni and their publications. In the future, when we have critical mass, we can use this data to properly rank young economists. Currently, we infer there start in the profession by dating their first publication. A graduation year would be more appropriate. Also, the genealogy data would also allow us to evaluate graduate departments.

Help make this service useful. You can add information by logging in using your RePEc Author Service credentials here. Thank you!

3 Comments | Economics Profession, RePEc features | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

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