RePEc in October 2010

November 4, 2010

It was once more a busy month at RePEc, in particular as we welcomed 14 new participating archives: University of Economics in Bratislava (II), Sage Publications, Universität Oldenburg, Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis (II), Institute for International Relations (Croatia), University of the Philippines, University of Sydney, University of Cyprus (II), Warsaw School of Economics, University of Genoa, MDPI, Journal of Income Distribution, Wroclaw University of Technology, University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Also, we recorded 797,409 file downloads and 2,791,358 abstract views. Finally, we reached the following thresholds during the last month:

20,000,000 article downloads
250,000 items with references
175,000 papers with references
5,000 institutions with registered authors

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

Volunteer appreciation: Ekkehart Schlicht

October 21, 2010

Ekkehart Schlicht has very recently earned his retirement as a Professor of Economics at the University of Munich and we hope he will remain active for many years in the RePEc community.

Prof. Schlicht has been a pioneer of sorts. While editor of the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft), he convinced his publisher to put the journal on RePEc, the first German journal to do so. And when he heard that EconWPA had to stop accepting new paper uploads, he stepped up and got the Library of the University of Munich to provide software, space and hosting for the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA). This allows authors whose home institution is not (yet) participating in RePEc to upload their works and make them available through RePEc. This service has proven to be wildly popular, with over 13000 uploads in its first four years of service, is now the second most popular series or journal on RePEc in terms of downloads. In fact, MPRA is so popular now that its volunteer editors could indeed use some additional help, in particular for submissions in English.

Prof. Schlicht has also occasionally been contributing to this blog, in particular about the future of the publishing industry. This reminds us that this week is Open Access week, so do not forget to promote Open Access around you for a better accessibility of research. In particular, open a local RePEc archive, or upload your works to MPRA!

And we all wish a happy retirement to Prof. Schlicht, and we hope to continue reading from him on this blog and the internal RePEc mailing lists.

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

RePEc in September 2010

October 5, 2010

Vacations are over in most universities, and it is also noticable at RePEc. Traffic is up, with 674,270 file downloads and 2,308,511 abstract views, and we continue to welcome more participants, be it archives or authors, with new registrations of the latter continuing at a high rate. The new participating archives were: Università di Milano-Bicocca (II), Universidad Catolica del Norte, Datamétrica, University of Economics in Bratislava, George Washington University (II), Texas Christian University, Mutual Fund Research Center, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Fundación BBVA, University of Antwerpen (II).

And finally, the thresholds RePEc reached were:
1,000,000,000 pages views on IDEAS (includes robots, spiders and repeats, though)
75,000,000 article abstract views
30,000,000 working paper downloads
150,000 JEL coded papers
150,000 papers announced through NEP
2,000 listed software components

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

NEP: Dissemination of new research through email and RSS

September 26, 2010

NEP (New Economics Papers) is a free, email-based service that disseminates weekly new working papers appearing in RePEc, currently 300-500 a week. It has 85 different, field-specific mailing lists, each managed by a volunteer editor who determines which papers are relevant for his/her field, with the help of an expert system.

So far, 150,000 papers have disseminated in about 30,000 reports, each paper being on average presented in two different reports. The subscriber base is close to 30,000 people, with over 60,000 subscriptions. NEP also offers RSS feeds, as well as some blogs discussing research (see sidebar). Of course, as everything in RePEc, everything is free and supported by volunteers.

We encourage you to use these services, and also to volunteer to help with running NEP, for example, if your field is not yet covered. NEP is currently headed by Marco Novarese and hosted by SUNY Oswego. Thomas Krichel and William Goffe offer technical support.

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

RePEc in August 2010

September 7, 2010

RePEc emerges from the Summer slumber with good news: we now have over 300,000 working papers and over 500,000 articles that are available online. 620,546 file downloads and 2,117,208 abstract views have been recorded. We welcome the following new archives into RePEc: University of Tokyo (II), Editura Lumen, INRA Dijon, National Bank of Slovakia, Fonds pour la Recherche en Ethique Economique, Indus Institute of Higher Education, Edizioni del Mulino, IDATE, University of Hawaii (II), Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Regulation2point0.

Finally, the thresholds we passed during the last month are:
3000000 cumulated software abstract views
500000 online articles
300000 online working papers
25000 registered authors

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

A few new features on RePEc services

August 30, 2010

RePEc services display the data collected through RePEc to end-users, be it through the web or email. These services constantly improve with new features. We recently reported about some that users may have overlooked. Here are some new ones:

  • On Econpapers, abstract pages now include a “share” button, which allows to easily share or save the page with hundreds or other services.
  • There are now RSS feeds for new citations, for specific articles, papers, series and journals. EconPapers and IDEAS provide links on their pages to the feeds. There are no feeds for authors, as they have been receiving this information for years through email (if registered).
  • A big part of RePEc is driven by user submissions, and here is a nice example. A script that allows to parse NEP reports, downloads the pdf files and put references in a BibTeX file.
  • Another user contribution, not new but I forgot it last time: RePEcfb, a Facebook application that allows to displays your latest works in your profile.

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

RePEc in July 2010

August 6, 2010

Over the last month, RePEc has reached major landmarks: 50 million file downloads, 25,000 registered authors and 1,200 participating archives. Monthly traffic numbers are down, with 595,637 file downloads and 1,875,579 abstract views, in part reflecting a further tightening of the eligibility criteria.

In July, the following institutions joined RePEc with a new archive: Frankfurt School of Management and Finance, Banco de Portugal, Inderscience Enterprises, Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Research Centre for Social Sciences (India), New Economic Association (Russia), Universidad de Valencia (II), and Universität Jena (III).

Finally, the complete list of thresholds reached during the month is:
50,000,000 cumulative downloads
12,500 listed book chapters
12,500 on-line book chapters
1,200 participating archives

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

Improved usage statistics for RePEc

August 6, 2010

Usage statistics for RePEc services are collected by LogEc. Producing meaningful statistics for accesses to web servers is a difficult task, especially so since we are merging data from several different sites. Rather than just counting the number of times a page or file is accessed (by a human or a piece of software indexing the web) the goal is to get as close as possible to a measure of the number of people showing an interest in a paper by reading the abstract page or downloading the full text file.

We have always been applying very strict criteria for what should be counted as a download or abstract view but over time it has become clear that the simple filtering for robots and removal of double clicks is not enough. Many new practices has developed on the web, some for a good purpose, some for a more questionable purpose. There are spam-bots, referer spamming (a stupid idea if there ever was one), anti-malware software that checks links on a webpage and warn users about dangerous links and much, much more that should not be counted. And, yes, there appears to be the occasional attempt to manipulate the statistics.

Starting from July 2010 we apply an additional set of heuristics to filter out these accesses. In conjunction with this we have also recalculated the statistics going back to January 2008. The overall effect is relatively small but there are substantial reductions in the number of accesses for a small number of papers.

More information at LogEc.

Leave a Comment » | RePEc features, Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Sune Karlsson

RePEc Author Service reaches major mark

August 4, 2010

The RePEc Author Service has just welcomed the 25,000th author! This service allows economists to build an online profile with all the works they have authored and that are listed in RePEc. A part from having this profile displayed and linked to from individual works on RePEc services like EconPapers and IDEAS, this allows authors to obtain monthly statistics about the popularity of their works, along with new citations discovered by the CitEc project. Collected data is also used to computed various rankings. Note that the 25,000 count only includes registered people who have at least one work listed in the profile. There are about 7,000 other registrations with empty profiles from people who have either overlooked this feature or not yet published some works. A listing of all registered authors is available on EconPapers and IDEAS.

RePEc currently lists 940,000 works from close to 3000 working paper series and 1150 journals, among others, contributed by over 1200 archives. It has become the standard bibliographic database in Economics, with RePEc services recording the 50 millionth download during July 2010. All RePEc activities are driven by volunteers as RePEc is not funded.

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

Little known features on RePEc sites

July 28, 2010

Various sites display information collected by RePEc, and they do so in ways that are not always similar. In particular, there are features that may not be noticeable to the casual user. Here are some featured on EconPapers, EconomistsOnline and IDEAS.


  1. EconPapers and IDEAS allow users to download bibliographic records in various formats, such as BibTeX, RIS (used by EndNote, ProCite and RefMan), plain text or HTML. IDEAS also provides this for all works of a registered author.
  2. RePEc services link different versions of a paper and article, as long as at least one of the authors has them listed in his/her profile and the titles are close. Contact RePEc for cases where titles differ.
  3. URLs on RePEc services are permanent, and can thus safely be used for referencing.
  4. EconomistsOnline allows to dynamically refine search results.
  5. Some services have advanced search features: EconPapers, IDEAS.
  6. One can navigate EconomistsOnline in four languages.
  7. IDEAS has tools to create reading lists and publication compilations of a group of people.
  8. EDIRC lists all publications of authors affiliated with an indexed institution.
  9. EconPapers provides a syntax and URL checker for the metadata submitted to RePEc.
  10. Both EconPapers and IDEAS provide links to citing and cited papers on each abstract page.
  11. Download statistics for series, journals, papers and authors are available at LogEc.

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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »