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…
RePEc at ASSA 2013 in San Diego
November 28, 2012
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Temporary RePEc announcements | 
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
News about EDIRC, the index of economics institutions
November 21, 2012EDIRC 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.
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
RePEc in October 2012
November 3, 2012What 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
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
About Open Access
October 26, 2012This 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, 2012This 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
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
Introducing the RePEc Genealogy
September 28, 2012A 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
New CitEc features
September 24, 2012In the past months we have added some new features to the Citations in Economics service:
References input service
Many documents in CitEc cannot be automatically processed due to a variety of reasons: they are not open access, not in PDF format or the PDF file can not be converted to text. Although some publishers provide us access to gated references, many are still missing. Often we get requests from authors asking why a citation to one of their papers is not included in CitEc. The answer is always the same: because the citing paper has not been processed. If this is your case, it is now possible to provide CitEc with the missing references and they will be processed. We ask, though, that all references from the citing paper be provided. Incomplete reference lists will not be considered. The lists of references and the contributor will be made public. The input form can be found here or from any IDEAS abstract page.
Add citation now
In some cases a paper cites a document available in RePEc but the system is not able to identify it as a RePEc item. For each reference not automatically linked by the system, the user may now add the handle of the cited document. All citations submitted through this feature are monitored to check if it is correct or not. A link to this form can be found from any IDEAS abstract page.
Citation profiles for authors
CitEc now provides citation profiles for authors. For each registered author in the RePEc Author Service, we provide a profile with her scientific production and the number of citations of each paper. Also we provide some indicators like the h-index and information about recent co-authors. For an example look at: http://citec.repec.org/p/z/pzi1.html. Note that this is work in progress, and the statistics on this page are not yet adjusted the way they are for the ranking statistics (versioning, self-citations).
New design for series pages
We have changed the format of the citations and production graphics. Also the papers bibliographic data is presented in a clearer way. An example at: http://citec.repec.org/s/2010/miewpaper.html
Included historical data for series pages
The time series for series citation data now goes back to 1990. Citations, document production and impact factor for all years is provided.
Use of persistent URLs
Now it is possible to access the citation data for authors and documents using short and persistent URLs like:, http://citec.repec.org/RePEc:mie:wpaper:382 or http://citec.repec.org/pdu7. To create such URLs simply add to http://citec.repec.org/ the paper/article handle or RePEc Author Service Short-ID.
Leave a Comment » | RePEc features | Permalink
Posted by Jose Manuel Barrueco
RePEc in August 2012
September 3, 2012RePEc went into a slumber for the last month. Quite little to report this time, except for heavy work in the background. The credentials for the accounts in the RePEc Author Service can now be used for authentication into various services, and NEP moved from SUNY Oswego to Penn State. See earlier blog posts about both events. Note also that NEP has now disseminated 200,000 working papers since its inception in 1998.
After adjustments for robots, reloads and other non-conformable traffic, we counted 441,838 file downloads and 1,714,916 abstract views from RePEc Services. Only four new archives joined RePEc: Socionet, Post Keynesian Economics Study Group, Academia Europea de Dirección y Economíe de la Empresa, and Birkbeck College (II). Finally, RePEc passed the following thresholds in the past month:
600,000 paper announcements though NEP (a paper may appear in several reports)
200,000 papers announced through NEP
3,500 working paper series
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
NEP now sponsored by Penn State
August 26, 2012Since 2005 one of the main RePEc computers, the one handling New Economic Papers (NEP) has been housed at the State University of New York at Oswego. NEP handles the weekly email notifications of new working papers in about 90 field-specific reports. As part of its academic mission, SUNY Oswego kindly let the RePEc project place the machine on its network in one of its server rooms. While Bill Goffe was the local sponsor, the vast majority of the effort of running it fell to Thomas Krichel.
Bill has now taken a job with Penn State and this server hast just moved with him. Bill and the entire RePEc team would like to thank SUNY Oswego for its support over the last seven years and it looks forward to working the Information Technology in Liberal Arts group at Penn State for hosting this machine for the foreseeable future.
Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, RePEc volunteers, Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann
OpenID authentication through RePEc
August 21, 2012It is now possible to use RePEc Author Service credentials to log into some other websites using the OpenID schema. This means that users do not need to use separate user names and passwords for those websites.
OpenID uses a user’s web page to establish credentials, as long as the website participates in OpenID. The RePEc Author Service now does so, with the drawback that few users know their profile URL (for example: http://authors.repec.org/pro/pzi1/). For this reason, services using OpenID credentials through RePEc will typically request the user’s RePEc short-ID (for example: pzi1). The latter can be found on an author’s profile on EconPapers or IDEAS, or by using a RePEc short-ID lookup tool.
A typical authentication procedure goes as follows:
- The user is asked for a personal RePEc short-ID at a referring service.
- The service forwards this information to the RePEc Author Service, which shows the habitual log-in page.
- The user enters the usual RePEc Author Service credentials (email address and password).
- Upon success, the RePEc Author Service asks for confirmation that log-in should proceed at the referring service.
- Upon confirmation, the referring service obtains confirmation from the RePEc Author Service that this is the person with this short-ID.
Steps 2 and 5 are bypassed if the user has a live RePEc Author Service session. It should be noted that the RePEc Author Service does not communicate the email address or the password, only that the owner of the short-ID (and its corresponding web page) is indeed this person. The referring service is then free to use the short-ID in its own authentication.
Note that some people will not be able to use this authentication service right away. Indeed, their RePEc Author Service profile needs to be enabled for this. This is not the case for anybody who has not logged in the RePEc Author Service since late June 2012.
OpenID authentication through RePEc is currently in use for the maintenance of reading lists and publication compilations on IDEAS, as well as for the RePEc plagiarism committee. Other services that require authentication, tied to RePEc or not, will soon follow.
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Posted by Christian Zimmermann
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