Review of EconPapers

Péter Jacsó reviews EconPapers in the January issue of Gale's Reference Reviews. Excerpt:

[I]n my 2004 review I criticized the meager coverage by EconLit of working papers. The good news is that in 2004 and 2005, the publisher of EconLit added records for 59,000 working papers from Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), the outstanding open-access database specializing in Economics. There have been several applications developed for processing various subsets of the RePEc database. Others, such as the IDEAS database maintained by Christian Zimmermann at the Department of Economics at Connecticut University, process the whole RePEc data set. Also processing the entire data set is the EconPapers database, which I review here. EconPapers (and the RePEc source file) is one of the best examples for successful large scale, collaborative projects among scientists, researchers and their institutions. It has close to 358,000 records for working papers (170,000 items from 1,500 series), journal articles (185,000 items from more than 400 journals), books (600), book chapters (1,020) and computer programs (1,300). Although EconPapers has only about half as many records as EconLit, it makes up for it by the rich content of the individual records. More than one-third of the journal article records and more than two-thirds of the working paper records have abstracts. The majority of the working papers are linked and available online free of charge. Seventy-six percent of the journal article records have links to the full text of the source documents. Although these are not open-access documents, many users will have free access to them by virtue of subscriptions by their libraries....EconPapers is yet another worthy and impressive implementation of the excellent Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database, proving the viability of efficient collaboration among researchers in providing open access to the full-text, or at least to the rich metadata, of their papers to users who otherwise would not have access to traditional indexing/abstracting tools, let alone to full-text journal archives.