RePEc in May 2009

June 6, 2009

It seems that every month we have some new big number to announce. This time we have four. First, RePEc has now information about 3/4 million items of research. Second, our email notification service NEP has now sent 500 weekly NEP-ALL reports (the ones containing all new papers). Then, the CitEc project has now managed to extract references from 200,000 items, and thus find citations to 250,000 items within RePEc.

New participants providing bibliographic information about their publications are: Arizona State University (II), Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies, University of Pitesti, Warwick Business School, University of Economics Prague, Technical University of Lisbon, Gestión Joven, Anadolu University, ISCTE, Polish Academy of Sciences, George Washington University (II)

In terms for traffic, LogEc registered 823,795 file downloads and 2,916,764 abstract views. Last month, it was 917,870 respectively 3,149,903. We mention this because these numbers had to be corrected after one week of IDEAS traffic was found missing, but too late for last month’s report. In any case, all statistics are available at LogEc.

Finally, the list of thresholds we have passed during last month is the following:
125000000 abstract views on IDEAS
750000 items listed in RePEc
250000 items cited within RePEc
200000 items with references extracted
500 NEP-ALL reports

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

Understanding update delays in RePEc

May 28, 2009

One of the advantages of RePEc is the extremely rapid update cycle. Once a paper has been added to a RePEc archive, RePEc services like EconPapers and IDEAS usually pick it up and list it within 24 hours. The paper is also disseminated through the NEP email notification service within two weeks. The longer delay comes from the weekly frequency of the emails, the various checks that are performed before submitting the paper to editors and the availability of editors. Papers are also available the next day for authors to claim into their profile on the RePEc Author Service. However, they may not get notified about this until it is their turn in the “automatic search” that rotates through all registered people, currently 27,000. A full cycle there takes close to three months. Indeed, such searches impose quite a burden on the machine, and they yield most of the time no result. When they know a new paper is up, we encourage authors to log in and do a “manual search”.

Other aspects take longer. Citation extraction can take several weeks, as the data about the paper needs to be gathered, analyzed and then compared with exiting material in the database. And once the results are returned to RePEc services, those may take a while, too. While EconPapers tries to add the new data within a day at all the right spots (cited papers, citing paper), IDEAS prefers to work on a rolling basis, refreshing paper pages every 30 days (or sooner if a change was done in the originating RePEc archive). Indeed, IDEAS also needs to adjust author citation pages, recompute statistics for authors and recalculate impact factors. As authors are usually quite impatient, the refresh cycle for authors is 18 days, unless they just modified their profile.

Download and abstract views statistics on LogEc are refreshed once a month, within the first days. A higher frequency is not possible due to the many checks those statistics go through, some of them being performed manually. For the same reason, rankings are released only once a month, except for the impact factors on series and journals, as well as the citation rankings for individual items, which are recomputed along the refresh cycle mentioned above for IDEAS.

And there are many other updates that can take a few days and the data bounces from one service to the other. For example, EDIRC houses data about institutions, and any update there will be reflected in author affiliations as their profiles get refreshed, which can take some wait. And EDIRC gets data about affiliated people from the RePEc Author Service, which can take a pass or two before being visible on the web. Or, information about papers disseminated through NEP are given to RePEc services. IDEAS, for example, uses this to categorize authors into topical fields.

RePEc is not a centralized service. It has servers, data gatherers, analyzers and users disseminated around the globe. They exchange data, but not in real time. Consider that there are over 1000 archives, and that RePEc services are disseminated over a dozen different machines. Still, update time are much, much faster than what one would have expected from any bibliographic service before RePEc came into existence.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Suggestion box

May 23, 2009

RePEc is entirely driven by volunteers, who are also users. Most current volunteers came to RePEc because either they wanted to help with a current project or because they had some idea they wanted implemented in RePEc. We are opening this suggestion box for several reasons: as way to encourage feedback, to encourage more volunteers to come forward and pick a suggestion, and finally have users and RePEc team members discuss the proposed suggestions.

At RePEc, we like to be open. After all, we are creating open bibliographies using open source software, and we encourage open access. RePEc is there for you, so tell us how you want it to be. So, make your suggestion in the comment section below.

28 Comments | RePEc features, RePEc volunteers | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Service downtime on Saturday

May 16, 2009

The following RePEc services will not be available Saturday morning (US East Coast time) due to power upgrades at the University of Connecticut server room:


Update: All services but the RePEc Author Service are up. The latter has issues with a software update that was also operated.
Update 2: All services now seem to to be fully operational. Please report any problems.

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

About self-archiving your research

May 15, 2009

When you write a paper, you typically pursue several goals. One is to publish it in a good journal in order to get recognition for your work. The other is to get read and have an impact (and get citations). While publishing in a good journal may help you achieve the second goal, this is not necessarily so as the access to most journal articles is restricted by subscriptions. One way around this is to make some version of your work available in other ways. This is referred to as self-archiving.

This can be done in several ways, greatly helped by the availability of the Internet:

  1. Have a copy on your web page.
  2. Have a copy in your local working paper series.
  3. Have a copy in your institutional repository, usually managed by the library.
  4. Host a copy elsewhere.

The first solution is clearly not efficient, as people would only find your work there by chance. This would also be the case for the other solutions, but there are good ways to make such works more widely available, RePEc being a major one. Indeed, once a working paper series is indexed in RePEc, it will be available in thematic search engines dedicated to Economics (EconPapers and IDEAS), disseminated through mailing lists and RSS (NEP) and further pushed to other indexers (Econlit, Google Scholar, OAISTER), etc.). But for this to happen, the working paper series would need to be indexed in RePEc (instructions). The same applies to an institutional repository (see more about that).

If these options are not available, the paper can be hosted elsewhere. For RePEc, the Munich Personal RePEc Archive is ready to accept uploads, and has in a couple of years accepted more 8000 papers, including quite a few older ones that researchers wanted to make available to anyone. Another option is SSRN, but this archive does not participate in RePEc.

Regarding self-archiving, the most frequent asked questions is: am I violating a copyright when uploading somewhere a working paper? The short answer is that in the vast majority of cases, no copyright that you may have signed away to a publisher is violated by uploading a pre-print, i.e., a previous version of your work. In many cases, it is sufficient that the working paper simply does not have the published layout, or that it not be the final version. Many publishers even allow post-prints, that is, uploads of final versions onto institutional repositories, as these are more and more mandated by institutions and sponsors. To check what the policy of each publisher is, consult SHERPA/RoMEO. Only in very rare cases does a working paper need to be withdrawn once published in a journal.

Note that when both a self-archived and a published version of a paper are listed in RePEc with the same title, and both are present in an author’s profile, RePEc will link between them. This allows the reader to find where a working paper was ultimately published, or to read a paper hidden behind a journal’s subscription wall. Thus authors: never remove from your profile works that you have authored.

Finally, for more about self-archiving, check out the Self-Archiving FAQ hosted by e-prints.

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

RePEc in April 2009

May 5, 2009

The big news of the month is that the RePEc Author Service surpassed 20,000 registered authors. When this service started, it was difficult to imagine that it would grow so big, and it continues to grow with about ten new registrants a day.

RePEc also grows with the addition of new participating archives, the following for last month: Monash University, Deakin University, Bank of Lithuania, Universidad Nacional de Salta, Università della Calabria, Rivista di Politica Economica, Institut d’Estudis Regionals i Metropolitans de Barcelona, Italian Department of the Treasury, Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia, Advances in Management. With the addition of Lithuania, There are now RePEc archives in 67 countries.

Traffic on our websites was lighter than expected, but still impressive numbers with 756,200 file downloads and 2,600,732 abstract views. This brings us to the thresholds we passed last month:

400,000 listed abstracts
400,000 items listed in author profiles
120,000 papers with JEL codes
50,000 articles with extracted references
20,000 registered authors
5,000 listed chapters
3,000 listed books

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc Author Service now 20,000 strong

April 30, 2009

Authors can register on the RePEc Author Service to create an online profile of their works and obtain monthly various statistics and newly found citations for their works. This service was introduced in its current form in 2004, and has just seen the 20,000th author register (in addition to over 6000 non-authors). While RePEc and the RePEc Author Service are not formally associations, we can still claim to be larger than the largest of all societies in Economics, the American Economic Association having about 18,000 members.

We are frequently asked how much of the profession we cover. This is very difficult to determine. Using the method discussed when we reached 15,000 authors, we can only say that we have currently a coverage between 41% and 80% of the profession.

Note that the RePEc Author Service is only a data collection service, as it obtains data from authors about what they wrote (among items listed in RePEc), their contact details and their affiliations. It solicits also help from them in identifying some citations. It is then the job of other services to do something with the collected data. Thus EconPapers and IDEAS display author profiles, EDIRC lists authors by affiliation, LogEc displays their download statistics and CitEc uses the collected citation data. In addition, rankings of authors and institutions can be computed.

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

The Economics of Open Access Publishing

April 24, 2009

Open Access Publishing is the free distribution of research, whether it is as a pre-print (working paper) or a peer-reviewed article. Since the creation of the web, more and more journal are choosing open access as their business model. One of them was recently Economic Analysis and Policy, published by the Economic Society of Australia (Queensland). To celebrate this, EAP has just published a special issue dedicated to the Economics of Open Access Publishing. Articles are written by economists discussing their experience with open access as well as by others involved in open access publishing. They cover the transition the publishing industry is currently undergoing, the surprisingly low cost of publishing an open access journal, the impact of open access and various open source aspects of the open access.

2 Comments | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Archives | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Tips for authors to improve their RePEc ranking

April 16, 2009

By far the most popular topic on this blog is material about rankings. People love to know who the best are and how they fare. This post is about optimizing one’s ranking within RePEc, and doing so in a way that does not trigger our safeguards against cheating. It turns out all the following points are points we actually want to encourage anyway so as to improve the quality of the data collected in RePEc.

As an author, here is what you can do once you logged into the RePEc Author Service:


  1. Make sure all your works listed in RePEc are actually in your profile. Thus, do not remove from your profile working papers that have been published. Some working paper series have higher impact factors than many journals, and working papers are much more downloaded than articles. In addition, if all versions are in your profile, we can link between them. (If you previously refused items that were yours, you can recuperate them by clicking on the “refused” tab in your research page, unrefuse the relevant items, and then redo the search)
  2. Make sure the name variations listed in your profile really encompass all possible ways a publisher may have listed your name. The automatic search is only going to find works with such names.
  3. There may be additional citations waiting for your approval. These are those for which we have less confidence that they pertain to the right work. Click on the “citation” tab in your author account.
  4. Link to your profile on EconPapers or IDEAS from your homepage or email signature.
  5. When refering to your works on a web page, put the link to EconPapers or IDEAS. We cannot count downloads that do not transit through RePEc services.
  6. Make sure all your works are listed on RePEc. For the missing ones, encourage the publisher to list them, or get your department to open a working paper series, or upload your works on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive.

As an institution, you can optimize your ranking by making sure your registered authors follow the advice from above and:

  1. Make sure everyone is registered and maintains his/her profile.
  2. Make sure everyone gives the proper affiliation. You can check who is listed with you by finding your institution on EDIRC.
  3. Have your working paper series listed on RePEc. Instructions are here.

If everyone optimizes like this, RePEc data will be more complete, current and useful. Help us make it better!

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

RePEc in March 2009

April 5, 2009

The big news this month is that RePEc has reached 1000 participating archives. This was achieved with an almost record crop in new archives, 16: Center for Industrial Studies Milano, INESC Porto, El Trimestre Económico, Netherlands Competition Authority, Asia-Pacific Policy Center, Villanova University, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Economic Publishing House, Romanian-American University, Lille Graduate School of Management, Yildiz Technical University, GWS Institute of Economic Structures Research, Bogazici University, Agricultural University of Athens, Kyushu Sangyo University, Portuguese Journal of Management Studies. In addition, over 2500 working paper series are now listed.

A new ranking has been published, one for young economists. And in terms of traffic, March was as busy as ever with 846,487 file downloads and 3,202,521 abstract views.

Other thresholds we passed in the past month:
120,000,000 cumulative abstracts views on IDEAS
350,000 new paper announcements disseminated through NEP
240,000 cited items

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

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