RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

General principles

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is an initiative that seeks to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related areas. We want to make research more accessible both for the authors and the readers. RePEc is a crowd-sourced effort: a) thousands of people and organizations contribute the underlying data, b) a core team of contributors manage the system, and c) sponsor organizations provide the infrastructure. As such, the RePEc initiative has no central expenses, and thus can provide all services for free to all users.

How RePEc operates:

Every publisher or provider puts text files describing their publications on their server. These files follow a simple but rigorous machine-readable syntax. They can then be automatically mirrored and made available to the public on the various RePEc websites. Some RePEc services complement these data with additional information such as citations or author details. RePEc is thus a facilitator that organizes the data for others to use.

How you can use RePEc as a provider or publisher:

Join over 2000 providers and publishers to increase the visibility of your publications. Follow these step-by-step instructions to create your RePEc archive. They show how to quickly set up your RePEc archive on your http, https, or ftp server and describe the syntax of the required metadata for working papers, journal articles, books, chapters, and software. For the complete technical details on the infrastructure and the metadata, you can also read about the Guildford Protocol and ReDIF, the Research Documents Information Format.

How you can use RePEc as a reader:

You can explore economic literature on two RePEc services. On EconPapers and IDEAS, search and browse, or follow links to author profiles, references, citations, keywords, or classifications. You can get notifications of new material with two other RePEc services, NEP and MyIDEAS.

How you can use RePEc as an author:

With the RePEc Author Service, you can create a profile of your indexed works. This allows the other RePEc services to link your profile to your works and vice versa. You also get notifications about the visibility of your works and citations newly found by CitEc. And if your publisher does not participate in RePEc, you can upload missing items to MPRA, copyright permitting.

How you can use RePEc as an institution:

RePEc can help you make your working papers (pre-prints) more visible, track how your researchers publish, and provide metrics to evaluate impact.

How you can leverage RePEc data as a researcher:

Data assembled by RePEc can be used for many purposes. Examples are academic research, tracking how working papers get published, adding metrics to a website, and evaluating researchers or institutions. We have instructions on how to access the data, including through an API.

There is much more that RePEc can do for you. Below is a list of all the RePEc services:

RePEc services

The following are services that use (principle) and contribute RePEc data. They also report usage statistics that can be used towards the RePEc rankings.

	Munich Personal RePEc Archive	Authors in institutions lacking a participating RePEc archive can submit their papers to MPRA and get them included in the RePEc database.

	RePEc Author Service	Author registration and maintenance of a profile on RePEc.
	IDEAS	The complete RePEc database at your disposal. Browse or search it all.
	EconPapers	Economics at your fingertips. EconPapers provides access to all of RePEc. Browsing and searching available.

	EDIRC	Directory of Economics institutions, with links to their members and publications listed on RePEc

	NEP	New Economics Papers is a free email, RSS and Twitter notification service for new downloadable working papers from over 90 specific fields. Archives are also available.
	RePEc Genealogy	Academic family tree for economics.
	LogEc	Detailed download and access statistics for RePEc items and authors.
	CitEc	Citation analysis from items in the RePEc database.
	CollEc	Rankings by co-authorship centrality for authors registered in the RePEc Author Service.
	RePEc Biblio	Hand-selected bibliography of articles and papers in economics.
	EconAcademics.org	Blog aggregator for discussion about economics research.
	SocioRePEc.org	Service to annotate RePEc papers in PDF and establish scientific relationships between papers.

	RePEc Plagiarism Committee	An effort to curtail plagiarism of RePEc contents.

Additional websites using RePEc

The RePEc bibliographic data is in the public domain and thus used by other services as well. The following are the ones we know of, and unfortunately none report usage statistics back to LogEc.

Over 2,200 archives from 103 countries have contributed about 4.5 million research items from 4,000 journals and 5,500 working paper series. Over 65,000 authors have registered and 75,000 email subscriptions are served every week.

Volunteers

RePEc is entirely based on the contributions of volunteers: Maintainers of RePEc archives, editors at NEP and MPRA, and those who run the various RePEc services. If you want to get involved check out our volunteer opportunities or contact any member of the RePEc team.

The ArchEc project provides long-term archiving of RePEc templates and full-text files, with the support of the Fondation Banque de France.

RePEc emerged from the NetEc group, created in 1992, which received support for its WoPEc project between 1996-1999 by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils, as part of its Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib). RePEc was created in June 1997 to decentralize the work done by WoPEc and thus make it independent of grant needs. RePEc is then guaranteed to remain free for all parties.

Contacts

Each RePEc service has contact details; for any question, please email them. For general enquiries about RePEc, in particular to open a RePEc archive, contact Kit Baum or Christian Zimmermann.

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