The RePEc Blog

This month there are some news regarding NEP, the working paper dissemination project. Its Mastodon accounts have all been moved to a new instance and three new reports were opened: NEP-AIN (Artificial Intelligence), NEP-INV (Investment), and NEP-NUD (Nudge and Boosting). We counted 420,659 file downloads and 1,715,671 abstract views. We welcomed the following RePEc archives: Thammasat University, International Journal of Latest Technology in Engineering, Management & Applied Science, International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation, and Modern Finance. And we reached the following milestones:
3,000,000 journal articles available in full text
20,000 links to research in blog posts identified on EconAcademics.

Belatedly, here is a rundown on what we have to report for August 2023. We counted 354,091 file downloads and 1,339,092 abstract views on EconPapers, IDEAS and NEP. We welcomed one new archive, the Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs at the European Commission. Finally, regarding milestones, we reached the following:

60,000,000 cumulative article downloads
4,500,000 items indexed in RePEc
18,000 authors listed in the RePEc Genealogy

What is new for RePEc in July 2023? We welcomed three new archives: International Journal of Economics, Universitat de València (Dep. of Economic History), Centro Studi sul Federalismo. We counted 333,668 file downloads and 1,247,841 abstract views in July 2023. The NEP site got a rework. And we reached these milestones.

2,000,000 research items listed in author profiles
1,200,000 articles with references
17,000 entries in the RePEc Genealogy

The latest from RePEc: NEP opened a couple of new reports disseminating the latest working papers: NEP-AIN (Artificial Intelligence), NEP-INV (Investment), and NEP-NUD (Nudge and Boosting). We added two archives: Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations and Technical University of Liberec. We counted 398,506 file downloads and 1,593,802 abstract views on EconPapers, IDEAS, and NEP. And we reached these milestones:

4000 indexed journals
100 NEP reports

We are rather late to report on this, but here is what we have to say about the month of May 2023 at RePEc. There is quite a bit of work in the background going on to solidify the infrastructure, that is, not much that is directly visible to the end user. We welcomed a couple of new archives: Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research (FIT),Cognitive Sustainability. We counted (after audit) 503,891 file downloads and 1,918,375 abstract views. And we reached the following important milestones:

250,000,000 cumulative article abstract views
4,000,000 items available online
3,000,000 indexed journal articles
1,000,000 items with JEL codes
60,000 indexed books

Now that users can amend their RePEc Genealogy entry directly from the RePEc Author Service, the academic family tree is seeing new profiles added at a rate of 1000 a month. We added a single new archive that indexes its publications in RePEc: Anser Press. We counted 496,131 file downloads and 1,829,913 abstract views this month. And we reached the following milestone:

16,000 entries in RePEc Genealogy

Last month, we added a new feature to the RePEc Author Service: users can now add their education information. We also picked up a good number of new participating archives: International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, Silesian University of Technology, Journal of Economic Policy and Management Issues, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Université du Québec à Montréal (II), Consorcio de Investigación Económica y Social (Peru), Czech Academy of Agricultural Science, We counted 519,267 file downloads and 2,013,230 abstract views. and we reached the following milestones:

125,000,000 cumulative abstract views on EconPapers
3,500,000 items with abstracts
25,000 books with citations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is much discussed these days. Indeed, it shows great promise in all sorts of endeavors, including writing essays on many topics. For the latter, while various attempts so far have not been entirely convincing, in particular because AI tools tend to invent references and cannot create new knowledge, there is still a threat that someone could excessively leverage these tools to pretend to have done their research.

Such abuse is supposed to be discovered in the peer-review process, but readers of pre-prints (working papers, discussion papers, etc.) may be caught off guard. As pre-prints are the primary type of publication that RePEc users read, we have been looking for a solution.

We are proud to announce that RePEc is collaborating with startup PiscesAI in developing a certification tool for pre-prints. This tool leverages AI to beat it at its own game: find what is written by AI and what is not. Authors can now request their working paper to be analyzed and certified as being AI-free. To do so, they need to log in the RePEc Author Service and look for the AI certification link. Once certified, participating RePEc services display a logo on the abstract page of the paper.

As mentioned before, this tool is only available for pre-prints. However, journals that do not conduct peer review can also ask for this privilege. For this, they need to contact the administrator email on the RePEc Author Service. They will then be marked as being available to authors for this certification service.

We have been very busy lately, which partially explains why the blog post is so late. Indeed, all the St. Louis Fed hosted sites migrated to new infrastructure. Simultaneously, the RePEc Author Service was relaunched with a completely rewritten code base which should allow it to handle better the tremendous increase of authors and works it handles. It is also getting gradually more and more new features.

In other news, we welcomed PC Technology Center (Ukraine), Multimedia SRL (Romania) and International Scientific Network (ISNet). We counted 427,181 file downloads and 1,622,285 abstract views. And we reached the following milestones:

1,000,000 items with a JEL classification code.

The RePEc Author Service has been rewritten from scratch. This blog post explains what the changes are and what our users should expect.

The site was rewritten because it suffered from extensive technical debt and because it was using an too great amount of resources, suffering from the growth of its userbase and the bibliographic holdings in RePEc since its inception.

What changes

1. Users will need to reset their password. Passwords are not present in clear test in the database, both in the new and old ones. They are encrypted with new keys, and thus need to be reset . Users can request an password reset email to be sent to them from this form. If the email address is not accessible, contact the administrator.
2. Suggestions are solely based on name variations. Previously suggestions for works to add to user profiles were based on the provided name variations as well as the last name of the user. With the size of the database this has become too much for many users. Now suggestions are solely based on name variations, and users will receive fewer useless emails. However, users need to make sure they have covered all the ways a publisher may refer to them, in particular middle names.

New features

1. The settings now allow to stop receiving the monthly update emails or the emails with new suggestions of potential works.
2. Under contacts, users can add their Twitter or Mastodon handles.
3. Coming soon: Adding other identifiers, such as ORCID, Google Scholar, WikiData.
4. Coming soon: Adding education information, which will also be visible on the RePEc Genealogy.

Temporarily missing features

Various smaller features will be missing only temporarily. One that will take longer to implement is the citation matching. The bulk of the citation matching is still continuing at CitEc. On the RePEc Authors Service, users were helping to clear the uncertain citation matches. We hope to bring this feature back once the easier features are dealt with.