RePEc

RePEc
Name	RePEc
Type	Collaborative database
Founded	1997
Country	International
Focus	Scholarly communication in economics

RePEc is a decentralized, collaborative bibliographic database dedicated to research in economics and related fields. It aggregates metadata for working papers, journal articles, software components, book chapters, and author profiles contributed by a network of archives, institutions, and volunteers. The project functions as an infrastructure that connects repositories, publishers, libraries, and individual researchers across institutions such as National Bureau of Economic Research, University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and London School of Economics.

Overview

RePEc operates as a distributed collection of metadata records hosted by contributors including university departments like Princeton University, research institutes like Centre for Economic Policy Research, and publishers such as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. Users discover content through service providers and tools developed by independent groups in the community; prominent service providers include repositories associated with IDEAS, EconPapers, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The database supports linking of authors to affiliations like World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank, and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and to works associated with conferences such as the American Economic Association annual meeting and the Econometric Society meetings.

History and Development

The project began in the late 1990s with contributions from technologists and economists affiliated with institutions such as University of Minnesota, Stanford University, and Columbia University. Early adopters included research labs and departments at Yale University and University of California, Berkeley. Milestones in development saw integration with digital library initiatives at organizations like SSRN and collaborations that connected with indexing efforts at JSTOR and Elsevier. The growth of RePEc paralleled shifts in scholarly communication exemplified by projects at arXiv and policies advocated by funders such as the National Institutes of Health and the European Research Council.

Structure and Components

RePEc’s architecture relies on plain-text metadata files organized by contributing archives—examples include institutional servers at University of Cambridge, discipline-specific centers like IZA Institute of Labor Economics, and national libraries such as the British Library. Core components comprise author registration systems that map researchers at organizations like Princeton, article metadata for journals published by houses like Wiley-Blackwell and Springer, and series entries for working-paper series produced by groups like CESifo and Centre for Economic Policy Research. Persistent identifiers and linking mechanisms interface indirectly with identifier schemes used by CrossRef, ORCID, and citation indices maintained by Web of Science and Scopus.

Services and Tools

A spectrum of services consumes RePEc metadata: discovery portals such as IDEAS and EconPapers; ranking and evaluation tools that generate author metrics comparable to bibliometric platforms used by Google Scholar and institutions like Clarivate; and specialized services offering citation analysis analogous to tools from Altmetric and PlumX. Other utilities provide integration with library catalogs at universities including New York University and University of Michigan, link resolvers used by consortia like JSTOR Consortium, and dataset discoverability efforts aligned with repositories such as ICPSR and Harvard Dataverse.

Participation and Content Contribution

Participation is open to archives operated by departments, journals, and personal web pages run by researchers from places like University of Toronto, University of Melbourne, and Peking University. Contributors supply formatted metadata compatible with standards used by libraries like Library of Congress and institutional repositories such as DSpace installations. Individual economists can create author profiles linking to affiliations at Columbia Business School, Wharton School, and Stanford Graduate School of Business; these profiles feed into ranking services and institutional reporting used by units including European Central Bank research divisions and national statistical offices.

Usage and Impact

RePEc’s aggregated metadata supports literature discovery for scholars working on topics associated with research centers like Kiel Institute and Brookings Institution and informs policy researchers at Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and International Labour Organization. The platform’s author ranking and paper series indexing influence hiring and evaluation processes at departments such as University of Chicago Booth School of Business and London School of Economics. Integration with teaching and dissemination practices has parallels with digital efforts at MIT OpenCourseWare and institutional open-access strategies promoted by consortia like SCOAP3.

Criticisms and Limitations

Critics point to uneven coverage across publishers and institutions, with gaps similar to those debated in analyses of Scopus and Web of Science indexing. Questions have arisen about metadata quality and deduplication for works associated with multi-affiliated authors from University of Oxford and McGill University, and about the reliance on voluntary contribution by archives such as small departmental servers. Comparisons to centralized services run by organizations like Elsevier highlight limitations in automated citation linking and integration with commercial bibliometric products. Concerns also focus on the potential for ranking measures derived from RePEc metadata to be misused in evaluation contexts at research bodies like Research Councils UK and national accreditation agencies.

Category:Economics databases