RePEc

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is one of the oldest and most influential open bibliographic initiatives in the social sciences. Unlike centralized repositories, RePEc is built as a decentralized network of thousands of contributing archives—universities, research institutes, publishers, and economic departments—each hosting their own metadata. RePEc then aggregates this metadata into a unified discovery ecosystem that powers numerous services widely used by economists.

At its core, RePEc offers access to millions of working papers, journal articles, book chapters, economic software components, and author profiles. Its strength lies in its focus on early-stage research: the working paper culture in economics means that RePEc acts as a first point of dissemination long before journal publication. This has made it central to the discipline’s scholarly communication workflow.

RePEc’s services extend far beyond simple indexing. Tools like IDEAS and EconPapers offer searchable interfaces, while NEP (New Economics Papers) delivers curated alerts for new working papers across subject areas. The RePEc Genealogy helps track advisor–student lineages, and RePEc Author Service links authors to their publications, enabling citation analysis and ranking metrics. Together, these tools form a uniquely rich ecosystem for understanding the structure, influence, and evolution of economic scholarship.

Limitations
The platform’s limitations reflect its decentralized nature: metadata quality varies across providers, full-text access depends on the hosting institution, and interfaces can feel dated compared to modern discovery tools. But RePEc’s openness, longevity, and discipline-specific depth make it indispensable for economists and policy researchers.