CitEc

CitEc is an autonomous citation-indexing service focused on economics research, developed as part of the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) ecosystem. It extracts bibliographic references from economics papers, identifies citations (i.e., which document cites which), and makes citation-data available for analysis by authors, institutions and the community. citec.repec.org+2citec.repec.org+2

Who it serves & how
CitEc is aimed at economists, doctoral students, research institutes and university libraries who want:

• To track how often an economics paper or author is cited by other economics works. 
• To explore citation networks and relations among working papers, journal articles, and series within economics.
• For institutional or bibliometric work, to benchmark research output, identify influence, or support open-access citation analysis.

Key features & value

• Processes large volumes of papers: as of latest update, CitEc has processed millions of papers and tens of millions of citation links. 
• An API for external applications: developers or institutional systems can query CitEc data in machine-readable formats (XML) for citations to or from a given RePEc document. 
• Author/team tools: Where authors register and use the RAS (RePEc Author Service), citation profiles can be supplemented or corrected manually. 

Considerations & limitations

• Coverage is narrower than some general citation indexes (e.g., Google Scholar) because CitEc only processes documents in the RePEc archive that meet certain criteria (e.g., freely available electronic version). 
• Because extraction of references is automated, errors or omissions are possible—users should treat numbers as indicative rather than perfect. 
• It is specialised for economics (and closely related social sciences) so for literature outside those fields this service may not apply.