The RePEc blog

The big news for this monthly feature is that we have now topped a quarter million working papers listed in RePEc. In terms of traffic, we have recorded 675,205 file downloads and 2,704,001 abstract views on the reporting RePEc services. Note that these numbers are, as always, the results of heavy adjustements in order to count legitimate human readers.

New contributors to RePEc for the month are: Queen’s University (II), Universität Giessen, World Bank (II), Bangladesh Development Research Center, Nottingham Trent University, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER), Emerald Insight, Universidad de Antioquia, Watson Wyatt Worldwide.

For the various thresholds achieved during this month, we have:
350,000 items listed in profiles of registered authors
320,000 abstracts listed
250,000 working papers listed
160,000 items with analyzed references
120,000 working papers with analyzed references
17,500 registered authors

Christopher (Kit) Baum is Associate Professor of Economics at Boston College and one of the early volunteers in RePEc, gradually taking important responsibilities. He opened at Boston College one of the first RePEc archives, first with the department’s working papers, soon complemented by a large collection of Stata routines. Once commercial publishers started to get interested in having their publications indexed on RePEc, he took the initiative to negotiate with several of them data transfer protocols, many of which he still maintains and hosts. He is also the person answering to the central RePEc email, which in particular corresponds with maintainers of new RePEc archives. He is also the administrator of the RePEc home page and of this blog.

Quite obviously, Kit has become an essential, if not overburdened part of the RePEc team. Without him, RePEc would not have grown, both in the number of archives and also in terms of the coverage of the large commercial archives. He is also very active and influential in the internal discussions among RePEc volunteers, where policy questions are argued and emergencies are resolved.

Kit is an atypical volunteer in RePEc in that he does so much. There are many other opportunities for volunteers to get involved in RePEc, large and small. Just ask or propose.

RePEc is a scheme to collect bibliographic information about publication and pre-publications in Economics. Publishers provide all the relevant information, which is then displayed in various ways by RePEc services. This allows users to have access to this data. While it is useful to find items of research while browsing or searching through these services, it is even better when one can upload the relevant bibliographic data directly into one’s bibliographic tool.

Every abstract page on IDEAS has links that allow to download such bibliographic information in various formats: as a HTML citation, a plain text citation, the BibTeX entry familiar to LaTeX users, the RIS format used in various software like EndNote, and the ReDIF format used by RePEc. For registered authors, it is also possible to obtain these records for all their publications in one download. If other formats are used in the research community, they can be provided as well. Just ask.

What is new at RePEc? We have introduced RSS feeds for our NEP mailing lists, now giving an alternative to the emails for the dissemination of new working papers. Econlit has opened a RePEc archive collecting bibliographic information about some of the top US working papers series that were not yet listed on RePEc. While traffic was low, as usual for Summer, with 575,686 file downloads and 2,316,727 abstract views, we got a steady stream of authors registering, about 10 a day.

The new archives who joined RePEc were: Institute of Agricultural Economics (Romania), University of Waterloo, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, Economic Statistics e-Center, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Economic and Social Review, University College Dublin, Suffolk University, Centro de Estudios de las Finanzas Públicas, Econlit.

Finally, RePEc passed the following thresholds:
500,000 cumulative book abstract views
400,000 cumulative abstract views at Socionet
190,000 online workig papers
90,000 cited working papers
40,000 articles with references
1,500 books listed

One crucial aspect of RePEc are the regular mailing that participants get. Indeed, it is easy to forget that one participates in some initiative if one is not reminded about it from time to time. Thus, authors registered in the RePEc Author Service get an email every month with statistics, a list of new citations that were discovered, and some news about RePEc. Since we have started these emails, we noticed that authors have become much more diligent in making sure their profiles were up-to-date and that they have responded to suggestions made in the emails.

One issue that arises over time is that emails become obsolete, as authors move or institutions normalize email addresses. When their email address changes, authors are asked to log in under their old address (which is the username), then change their contact details to the new address (which becomes the new username). Creating a new profile with the new address leads to duplicates.

But some authors forget, as they do not check their old mailboxes. Eventually, the monthly emails bounce, and these authors are placed on the list of lost authors, along with a mention in their online profiles on EconPapers and IDEAS. This list has been very useful in keeping the number of bad emails down, currently 243 out of 17,300. as they and others come forward with updates. Sometimes, we also learn that some authors have unfortunately passed away. Their profile is kept online, hopefully in perpetuity.

Apart from the 17,300 authors with works listed in RePEc, the RePEc Author Service has also about 5500 registrants with no listed works. Either they chose not to claim the listed works, oversaw this feature while registering, or simply registered erroneously. These people get a reminder every six months. Emails that bounce are promptly removed from the service, as these profiles serve no purpose. Indeed, the RePEc Author Service is about assembling publication, affiliation and contact information of authors.

Previous discussion on this blog (1, 2) covered the issue of peer review of new research, in particular now that the Internet has become such a predominant medium of communication. One way in which peer-reviewing could work is through blogs, wherein in a blogger discusses a paper and lets others comments on the paper (and the discussion).

Currently little of this is happening in Economics, as blog are much more focussed on discussing current events and each other. To promote the more academic blogs, and to encourage others to open such academic blogs, I just created the Econ Academics Blog, which aggregates those blogs that fit somewhat these criteria at this point. The Econ Academics Blog does not have blog discussions about research, but rather links to them. I hope people will find it useful as a portal and use it on a regular basis to find interesting discussions of academic nature, and that more appropriate blogs will be created.

NEP (New Economics Papers) is an email service that alerts subscribers to new online working papers in their area of interest. About 80 fields are currently available, and the roughly weekly emails are sent free of charge. While the RePEc team thought email dissemination was sufficient, there also appears to be demand for RSS feeds as for this and other blogs. This is now available, and the RSS feeds can be subscribed to by clicking on the relevant field report on the NEP home page.

This new feature was added in typical RePEc fashion: David Hugh-Jones inquired with Marco Novarese why there was no RSS feed, Thomas Krichel encouraged David to set it up, and two days later, it was up.

If you think new features should be added to RePEc, we always welcome suggestions, especially if you are willing to do it yourself… much like many of the available NEP editors have been volunteers who just wanted a particular field to be covered.

While the Summer is usually calm, RePEc has just passed some historic benchmarks in terms of content and traffic: 750 journals listed, 2000 working paper series, half a million works available online, 20 million working paper downloads recorded, 200,000 works that are cited within RePEc. This all reflects the tremendous growth that RePEc continues to enjoy.

New contributors to RePEc during the month on July were: University of Petrosani, University of Sussex, University of Trento, Hanseatic University, Institute of National Economy (Romania), University of Wisconsin Press, TOBB University of Economics, Asociación Española de Contabilidad y Administración de Empresas, European Commission (DG Taxation), and University of Chile.

This month’s traffic numbers were 595,349 file downloads and 2,407,502 abstract views for those RePEc services that provide statistics: EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP and Socionet. These numbers are filtered for multiple downloads, robots and other “unusual” behavior.

Finally, let’s see all the thresholds that have been beaten, an impressive list for a single month:
20,000,000 cumulative working paper downloads
2,000,000 cumulative software component abstract views
500,000 works available online
500,000 cumulative chapter abstract views
333,333 works listed in registered author profiles
200,000 works with citations
125,000 article abstracts
125,000 JEL coded items
17,000 registered authors
2,000 working paper series
1,250 books listed
1,000 books available online
750 journals

Two RePEc services, EconPapers and LogEc, are down since late Saturday or early Sunday. This post will provide updates on the situation.

EconPapers provides a browsable and searchable database of bibliographic entries from RePEc. IDEAS provides a similar service and can be used in the meanwhile. LogEc provides usage statistics for the listed works. The statistics will not be affected due to the downtime.

Update (Tuesday): Both services are running again, on a different machine. The same URLs are valid, but DNS servers will take a little while to understand the change of location.

Update (Friday): Both services are now running again on the original machine, which suffered a power supply problem.

There are many ways to rank researchers, but rarely has one been adopted as fast as the h-index. It has been introduced by physicist Jorge E. Hirsch in August 2005, and is defined by h, with h works from an author having at least h citations. Compared to “raw” citation counts, which may put too much emphasis on a few much cited works, it highlights the trade-off between quantity and quality of research. Of course, like any research ranking criterion, it is imperfect in many ways and controversial to all but those who rank well. But it allows to highlight some aspects of research productivity.

RePEc has reported rankings according to the h-index since October 2005 for authors. There is also a variant for institutions and regions, where h is defined as the number authors with an h-index of at least h. Due to the large number of ties, how far an institution is from reaching the next h is also taken into account.

Quite naturally, the h-index can also be defined for journals and series. Starting this month, RePEc publishes such h-indexes: journals, working paper series (preprints), and all series combined. Obviously, journals and series with longer publishing histories are favored, and we hope this will have the side-effect of publishers making sure to have a complete listing on RePEc.

By the way, the overall h-index for all of RePEc is at 225 as of today.

Addendum (August 3): For authors, there is now also a Wu-index. This has been proposed by Qiang Wu and is defined in a similar way to the h-index, except that one needs 10 citations per paper. Due to the very large number of ties and zeros, this criterion is, however, not integrated in the overall rankings.

As highlighted in a recent post, we encourage deep linking in RePEc services. This is particularly useful for reading lists and syllabi. In fact, IDEAS provides simple tools to create such lists on its web site.

The first one allows to create reading lists by providing code that is similar to HTML and includes handles of items listed in RePEc. Each of these items is then automatically matched with other versions, thus allowing to find a free version of a password protected article, or find the latest version of a working paper as published in a journal. Different layouts are possible: one for a course syllabus, one for reading lists.

The second one allows to create a list of publications from a set of authors registered on RePEc. Existing examples include ex-pats from some countries, graduates from programs, winners of prizes, etc. Note that such lists are automatically computed for members of research units or departments. See listing on EDIRC. For other lists, this tools comes handy.

June was a surpisingly busy month, especially in terms of content expansion. We have now reached 600,000 works listed on RePEc, and it took only 10 months to add the last 100,000. Traffic was also heavy for the season, reaching 584,843 downloads and 2,803,705 abstract views.

The following institutions joined RePEc with an archive: World Scientific Publishing, Queens College (CUNY), GEFRA, Kobe University, Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW), Université d’Auvergne, Universtät Freiburg, Società Italiana degli Economisti. Finally, here are the thresholds we reached this month:

140,000,000 cumulative abstract views
100,000,000 cumulative abstract views on IDEAS
45,000,000 cumulative abstract views for articles
600,000 listed works
350,000 articles listed
300,000 online articles listed
240,000 working papers listed
180,000 working paper abstracts
150,000 items with references
120,000 article abstracts
20,000 NEP reports

Hotlinking is the practice of linking to a web page deep in a web site, instead of its front page. This practice is discouraged by many news sites, both because they prefer users to browse through the site and because links may become obsolete.

At RePEc, we actually encourage hotlinking. Links in RePEc services are designed to stay current (in principle). Also, instead of linking to a PDF file on a researcher’s web page, which may disappear, abstract pages on EconPapers or IDEAS are much more stable. In addition, these abstract pages may provide links to other versions of the paper. This proves particularly useful if the user does not have access to a password protected article from a commercial publisher, or if the user wishes to know whether the paper has been published. Other links on the abstract page can also be valuable, like those to author profiles, references, citations and related works. Finally, authors always appreciate when paper downloads are counted towards their statistics. Indeed, RePEc can only monitor traffic routed through its services.

Therefore, we encourage hotlinks to RePEc services on blogs, online syllabi, personal web pages, online bibliographies, etc.

Women have always been underrepresented in Economics. For example, regarding US faculty, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), a subcommittee of the American Economic Association, determines in its latest annual report that women represent 28% of assistant professors, 21% of associate professors and 8% of full professors in PhD granting Economics department. As a whole, they represent 19% of all Economics faculty.

The point of this post is not to complain about the low proportion of women in the profession, or about their dwindling share up the ladder, but about the lack of involvement on women in RePEc. Currently, their share is at 14.5%. It is clearly below the 19% mentioned, although it is slowly increasing (it was 13.6% a year ago and 12.7% two years ago). Why this underrepresentation?

It is of course possible that their a bias in those numbers, because the CSWEP numbers pertain only to the United States and the RePEc Author Service covers the whole world. So, let us analyze the top 1000 economists from Tom Coupé’s list. Of the men, only 22.9% are not registered taking the ranking by publications, and 32.4% with the ranking by citations (which includes quite a few non-economists). For women, the numbers are 37.2% and 44.4%. We see that top female economists are less likely to be signed up with RePEc.

Therefore, encourage women to register at the RePEc Author Service!

PS: You may wonder how these numbers are determined, as gender is not indicated when registering with the RePEc Author Service. It is inferred from first names, using a database of gender likelihood by name. For the more uncertain cases, an exception table was created using additional information, in particular from pictures on personal web pages.

Many authors may have rejoiced about the increase in their citation counts in their last monthly notification. At least part of this increase is due to an error that crept in while fixing a citation display issue for authors on IDEAS. This error is now fixed and next month’s mailing will show a substantial decrease in citation counts for some. While I got no complaints this time, I expect some in a few weeks…

In some cases, counts will be even lower than before the error crept in. This is because now extra care is taken not to double count citations to and from different versions of the same works. As always, self-citations are not counted in totals but still displayed on IDEAS.