The best young economists?

March 25, 2009

Who are the best young economists? RePEc publishes all sorts of rankings based on its data, but has so far been missing one that highlights the best young economists. Indeed, they are typically invisible from the general rankings as it takes many years to build up the required body of work and citations to be featured among the top economists.

Unfortunately, authors registering with RePEc do not supply their year of birth or the year they obtained their last graduate degree. However, RePEc has information about the date of most publications, and it is then possible to determine (roughly) when a career started. Here, we do not make the type of publication (article vs. working paper, for example), as the goal is to try to approximate when the economist started being active in research.

Based on this criterion, two groups of economists are selected: those with their first publication, whatever the medium, less than five years ago, and those less than ten years ago. Quite obviously, there is considerably more measurement error compared to that already present in the general ranking, first because of the imperfect measure of the start of the career, second because the body of work is typically much smaller. But we hope people will still find these rankings useful.

5 Comments | RePEc rankings | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Volunteer recognition: Marco Novarese

March 18, 2009

In our continuing series featuring RePEc volunteers, we present today Marco Novarese. He is assistant professor at the faculty of Law, University of Piemonte Orientale (Italy) and he directs the NEP project within RePEc. NEP disseminates new working papers though email and RSS in currently 84 different fields, each staffed by an editor who sorts what is relevant among all new items. Marco edits the NEP report on Cognitive and Behavioural Economics, but more importantly heads the entire project. His responsibility is to solicit and recruit new editors, encourage the creation of new reports (volunteer if your field is not covered) and monitor the project.

Before heading NEP, Marco’s responsibility was to check that the data sent to NEP editors for appraisal is clean and does not contain obvious misfits (papers that are not new, for example). Not having found a volunteer to do this, he is still on the hook. Maybe you can help him out?

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

1000 archives participating in RePEc

March 10, 2009

With last week’s additions, RePEc is now carrying bibliographic data from over 1000 archives. This is a good opportunity to give a reminder how data actually makes it to RePEc. Indeed, there is no staff at RePEc that would be inputing data, this is all provided directly from the publishers. These, be it commercial publishers, Economics department, research centers or central banks, put files at a predetermined address on their web or ftp server, following the Guildford protocol. These files follow a set syntax codified by ReDIF (Research Documents Information Format). The RePEc services then gather this bibliographic data on a regular schedule (typically every night) and display it to the public.

Thus, if you are a publisher and want something listed on RePEc, follow our step-by-step instructions. If you are an author unhappy that some of your works are missing, encourage your publisher(s) to participate. Alternatively have your institutions participate with its working papers (most publishers allow pre-prints or post-prints to be posted) or load your works up at the Munich Personal RePEc Archive.

Update (March 13): We have now also supassed 2500 working paper series…

2 Comments | Open Archives | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in February 2009

March 3, 2009

A short, but busy month considering we were close to beat our monthly traffic records, with 859,562 file downloads and 3,115,704 abstract views. We also continue adding material at a tremendous pace, about 500 items a day and 15 new authors register every day.

The following archives joined RePEc: Cairn.info, Università di Roma Sapienza, University of Nottingham (II), Management and Organization Review, CEFIG Budapest, Latvijas Banka, University of Pisa, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, South Dakota State University.

In terms of thresholds passed, we have the following:
25,000,000 downloads through IDEAS
600,000 items available online
140,000 items with JEL codes
900 journals

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Weathering the crisis

February 25, 2009

The news are filled with reports of financial difficulties and funding is being cut left and right for all sorts of programs. How is RePEc affected? On the revenue side, we are happy to report that it is stable, at zero. On the expense side, we seem to be unchanged, at zero as well. RePEc is completely run by volunteers so that it does not rely on funding and can provide its services for free to everyone.

That does not mean that there are no risks. RePEc services also rely on hardware and hosting services. So far, we have managed to find sponsors for those. We have little slack, though. If a machine were to fail, or a host were to give up a slot, we would have to scramble for solutions. We are therefore always on the lookout for new opportunities. We even have a new project currently looking for a home. If you are interested in any capacity, do not hesitate to contact us!

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc archives: AgEcon Search

February 18, 2009

This guest post was written by Julie Kelly and Louise Letnes.

Over the past few months, the papers that make up AgEcon Search have been added to RePEc. All papers are available in full text, and they include working papers, conference papers and articles from smaller journals.

AgEcon Search includes a wide range of topics in applied economics, including agricultural, development, energy, environmental, and resource economics. Over 170 groups from 20+ countries contribute their work. As of early 2009, 27 journals are included.

The journals that are included in AgEcon Search are mostly small press journals with limited circulation, and for many it is the only electronic access that is available. Some have volumes back to the 1940s, and a number obtained small grants for the digitizing of older materials. A few have one or two year embargoes on the newest issues, but most do not. Recently, several of the journals have dropped their embargoes.

AgEcon Search began in 1994 as a local solution for the applied and agricultural economics working papers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin. It is housed at the University of Minnesota, and co-sponsored by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

The involvement of the large professional associations has been critical to the success of AgEcon Search. Economists presenting Contributed Papers at the annual AAEA meeting must submit their full papers to AgEcon Search prior to the meeting, or they will be dropped from the program. The European Association of Agricultural Economists and the International Association of Agricultural Economists have adopted similar procedures.

Two librarians, Louise Letnes and Julie Kelly, serve as coordinators of AgEcon Search. They work at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Applied Economics and the University Libraries, respectively. Among their duties, they attend agricultural and applied economics conferences to promote AgEcon Search and recruit new material.

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Posted by repecblogguest

Economics Search Engine

February 11, 2009

The Economics Search Engine (ESE) is a subset of the Google search engine that restricts its searches to 23,000 economics web sites. It is an outgrowth of Resources for Economists on the Internet (RFE) which lists and describes items for economists. Today many users prefer to use search engines to find resources of interest, so ESE was developed with the assistance of Hal Varian and Othar Hansson, both of Google. ESE not only searches web sites listed in RFE, but also web sites from RePEc Author Services (over 19,000 economists have registered) and Economics Departments, Institutes and Research Centers in the World (EDIRC), which lists more than 11,000 such sites. Thus, by searching at ESE, a user interested in an economic topic is searching over a substantial fraction of the web devoted to economic issues.

ESE is implemented with a Google Custom Search Engine, which enables users to set up a site that restricts a Google search to a user-selected set of sites. It takes some work to set up one as large as ESE, but smaller ones are quite straightforward and doubtless many would benefit from setting one up for their own needs. As with many Google services, it is currently in beta test-mode, so the results might be problematic at times.

To make ESE particularly easy to use, it includes a “Search Plugin” for Internet Explorer 7.0 or FireFox 2.0 and 3.0 users. This allows you to initiate searches directly from a search box in your browser; thus you don’t even need to visit ESE directly. You should be offered one for ESE when you check your search plugins when you’re at the ESE web site.

Leave a Comment » | Use of RePEc data | Permalink
Posted by Bill Goffe

RePEc in January 2009

February 3, 2009

The big news this month is that we have now surpassed 700,000 bibliographic items listed in RePEc. The last 100,000 additions took only 7 months, something that seems difficult to beat. The other news is that the ranking methodology has changed following the discussion on this blog. Essentially, authors with multiple affiliations are now treated differently, as they contribute with variable weights to each of their affiliations, and these weights are used to distribute their scores across the countries and regions they are ranked in. Also, a NEP report for the Arab World was created. Finally, we experienced heavy traffic on our sites, with 766,586 file downloads and 2,756,978 abstract views in January 2009.

New participants in RePEc are: Universität Augsburg, Universität Bielefeld, World Agroforestry Centre, University of Craiova, Centre of Financial and Monetary Research “Victor Slavescu”, Hokkaido University, Kobe University, Romanian National Institute of Economic Research, C.D. Howe Institute, Central Bank and Financial Authority of Ireland, University of Virginia (II), Danubius University, INRA-Nancy, Utah State University, University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf, University of Resita

With regard to major thresholds reached during the month, we can report:
4,000,000 extracted references
700,000 items listed
500,000 abstract views through Socionet
350,000 online articles
125,000 cited articles
100,000 cited working papers
50,000 subscriptions to the NEP email notification service
3,500 series and journals listed

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

Volunteer recognition: José Manuel Barrueco Cruz

January 25, 2009

José Manuel Barrueco Cruz was one of the first volunteers to participate in RePEc, and he is still very active nowadays. As a librarian at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Valencia (Spain), he noticed in 1994 Thomas Krichel‘s efforts with WoPEc and volunteered to help him gathering links to online working papers. When the links became too numerous to manage, they devised the system that underlies RePEc nowadays. José wrote the scripts that allowed to gather the metadata from the various publishers and to display the collected data for the now defunct WoPEc and BibEc websites. He also generously adapted these scripts for the launch of IDEAS.

His major endeavor since 2002 is CitEc, the citation analysis of documents indexed by RePEc. As detailed in previous posts, this is no simple undertaking. First, the references need to be properly extracted from documents. Second, the matching process is made more difficult by the many ways in which references are listed. Finally, the data in RePEc is now so large that important computing resources are necessary, something José found at the neighboring Polytechnical University of Valencia. And the evaluation of institutional archives has now become the subject of his doctoral thesis in library science, while he is concurrently working and teaching at the library for social sciences of the University of Valencia.

Beyond his involvement in documenting research in economics, José is also active in two other projects: DoIS (Documents in Information Science) and E-LIS (Eprints in Library and Information Science). No wonder that he was finalist for the European Business Librarian of the Year award in 1999

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc archives: BC Statistical Software Components archive

January 16, 2009

One of the most actively accessed RePEc series is the Boston College Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive. This was the first RePEc series to list software, rather than working papers, journal articles, books or chapters. It currently contains 1,275 items in a number of programming languages, over 1,000 of which relate to the Stata statistical package. Stata has the unique capability to download user-written components and install them over the web, and its developers have in fact written a ‘ssc’ command that accesses the archive. Users may search the SSC Archive from within Stata or from the web interface of IDEAS or EconPapers.

The series is the 7th most popular series (in terms of total downloads) over the past 12 months, as documented by LogEc for downloads through RePEc services. Downloads of Stata components (“ado-files”), including directly from Stata, are tracked separately, and total over 100,000 per month. A custom perl script is used to translate the RePEc template for each package into the Stata .pkg file format used by web-aware Stata. The availability of a single, reliable site from which user-written routines can be easily downloaded has made the SSC Archive a very important part of the Stata user community.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Archives | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Kit Baum

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