The RePEc Blog

EDIRC is an index of economics departments, institutes and research centers created in 1995 that has been feeding RePEc with data about such institutions. But beyond just a listing of institutions, it has evolved into an information source of its own right. Currently, it has the following additional features:

• Links to journals or working paper series published by the respective institutions and indexed in RePEc.
  
• Listings of all people affiliated with the respective institutions and registered with the RePEc Author Service.
  
• For these people, a link to a compilation of all their publications.
  
• A recent add-on is a listing of all alumni (final degree) as found on the RePEc Genealogy.
  
• For the alumni as well, a link to a compilation of their publications.
  

With close to 13,000 listed institutions, EDIRC has grown a lot since its start. After all those years, the database will now go through some gradual changes, among which are:

• New categories: the current ones were designed when there were only a few hundred listed institutions.
  
• About 12% of the links are known to be invalid. They are currently being systematically checked for better addresses, but this will take several months.
  
• Institutions that are known to be defunct and that have no links to people or publications will be removed.
  
• When possible, chairs and similar “micro-institutions” will be consolidated. They change too frequently and have become a maintenance burden with no significant benefit. This pertains particularly to Germanic universities.
  
• An effort is currently being made to add translations of institution names to English wherever possible. Indeed, it appears that even natives users search for the English name.
  
• Speaking of search, the search engine will be improved to make searches more intuitive and efficient than is currently the case.
  

In the past months we have added some new features to the Citations in Economics service:

References input service

Many documents in CitEc cannot be automatically processed due to a variety of reasons: they are not open access, not in PDF format or the PDF file can not be converted to text. Although some publishers provide us access to gated references, many are still missing. Often we get requests from authors asking why a citation to one of their papers is not included in CitEc. The answer is always the same: because the citing paper has not been processed. If this is your case, it is now possible to provide CitEc with the missing references and they will be processed. We ask, though, that all references from the citing paper be provided. Incomplete reference lists will not be considered. The lists of references and the contributor will be made public. The input form can be found here or from any IDEAS abstract page.

Add citation now

In some cases a paper cites a document available in RePEc but the system is not able to identify it as a RePEc item. For each reference not automatically linked by the system, the user may now add the handle of the cited document. All citations submitted through this feature are monitored to check if it is correct or not. A link to this form can be found from any IDEAS abstract page.

Citation profiles for authors

CitEc now provides citation profiles for authors. For each registered author in the RePEc Author Service, we provide a profile with her scientific production and the number of citations of each paper. Also we provide some indicators like the h-index and information about recent co-authors. For an example look at: http://citec.repec.org/p/z/pzi1.html. Note that this is work in progress, and the statistics on this page are not yet adjusted the way they are for the ranking statistics (versioning, self-citations).

New design for series pages

We have changed the format of the citations and production graphics. Also the papers bibliographic data is presented in a clearer way. An example at: http://citec.repec.org/s/2010/miewpaper.html

Included historical data for series pages

The time series for series citation data now goes back to 1990. Citations, document production and impact factor for all years is provided.

Use of persistent URLs

Now it is possible to access the citation data for authors and documents using short and persistent URLs like:, http://citec.repec.org/RePEc:mie:wpaper:382 or http://citec.repec.org/pdu7. To create such URLs simply add to http://citec.repec.org/ the paper/article handle or RePEc Author Service Short-ID.