RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

General principles

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 84 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components, all maintained by volunteers. The collected data is then used in various services that serve the collected metadata to users or enhance it.

So far, over 1,750 archives from 86 countries have contributed about 1.7 million research pieces from 2,100 journals and 4,000 working paper series. About 45,000 authors have registered and 75,000 email subscriptions are served every week. See below on how you can be part of this initiative.

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.

	RePEc Author Service	Author registration and maintenance of a profile on RePEc.
	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.
	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.
	RePEc Genealogy	Academic family tree for economics.
	RePEc Biblio	Hand-selected bibliography of articles and papers in economics.
	EconAcademics.org	Blog aggregator for discussion about economics research.
	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.
	EDIRC	Directory of Economics institutions, with links to their members and publications listed on RePEc
	RePEc Plagiarism Committee	An effort to curtail plagiarism of RePEc contents.
	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.
	SPZ	An online workplace for researchers, tutors and students within the RePEc information space.
	Socionet	A Russian (and Russian language) implementation of the RePEc method and database as the collective information environment for the social sciences. Database customization and filtration by a "personal information robot".

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.

Getting information into RePEc

The basic principle is that publishers index their content themselves into RePEc. They host the metadata on their http or ftp site, following the Guildford Protocol, which indicates how the metadata archive should be structured. Then, the syntax of the metadata template syntax is guided by ReDIF, the Research Documents Information Format.

If you intend to contribute information about your publications to RePEc, you may read the above documents or use these step-by-step instructions or sample templates. The same instructions apply for commercial publishers or research institutes.

RePEc archive maintainers may also make good use of the template syntax and link checker, of tips and tricks and the FAQ.

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.

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.