RePEc
by RePEc volunteers · Service · also known as Research Papers in Economics, IDEAS, EconPapers
Volunteer-run decentralized bibliographic database of economics research, fed by institutional archives and served through IDEAS, EconPapers, the Author Service, CitEc, NEP and MPRA
Overview
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a decentralized, volunteer-driven initiative to disseminate economics research. Publishers and institutions describe their working papers, articles, books, chapters and software in ReDIF template files on their own servers; RePEc mirrors these more than two thousand archives and exposes them through services such as IDEAS and EconPapers (search and browsing), the RePEc Author Service (author profiles and citation notifications), CitEc (citation analysis), NEP (e-mail and RSS alerts for new working papers by field), EDIRC (directory of economics institutions), LogEc (download statistics), the RePEc Genealogy and rankings of authors, institutions and journals. Authors whose institutions lack an archive can upload papers to the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA).
Everything is free to use and the initiative has no central budget; the bibliographic data are described as freely available with a request that commercial users contact RePEc first, and they are reused by Google Scholar, OpenAlex and EconLit among others. Access for research goes through the archive templates, an API intended for small repeated queries and bulk exports on request, with scraping of the websites strongly discouraged. Coverage is limited to participating archives, metadata quality varies by contributor, and the main site is served over plain HTTP.
Editorial note on uncertainty. The homepage describes the bibliographic data as public domain while the data-access page asks commercial users to make contact first; both statements are reflected.
Capabilities
- Decentralized archive metadata in ReDIF templates
- IDEAS and EconPapers search and browsing
- Author profiles and citation alerts via the Author Service
- CitEc citation analysis and LogEc download statistics
- NEP new-paper alerts by field
- Rankings of authors, institutions and journals
- MPRA upload for authors without an archive
- API and bulk access for research use
Typical workflows
- Registering a department's working-paper series
- Tracking citations of one's papers via the Author Service
- Bibliometric analysis of economics working papers from the templates
Strengths
- Free and community-governed
- Deep coverage of economics working papers
- Open metadata reused by other indexes
Limitations
- Coverage limited to participating archives
- Metadata quality varies by contributor
- API suited to small queries; bulk access on request
- Main site served over HTTP
Prerequisites
- Institutional archive or MPRA account to contribute
Who it is for
- Economists and economics departments
- Scientometricians studying economics
Alternatives & comparison
SSRN is a centralized commercial preprint host with download metrics; arXiv covers econ and q-fin among the quantitative sciences; OpenAlex and Google Scholar index RePEc content among much else. RePEc remains the most complete index of economics working-paper series.
- arXiv
Free, moderated open-access preprint server for physics, mathematics, computer science, statistics, quantitative finance, economics and related fields, with an open API and bulk access
Open sourceFree - Google Scholar
Free scholarly search engine from Google that indexes articles, theses, books and court opinions with citation counts and author profiles
ProprietaryFree - OpenAlex
Open catalog of the global research system: works, authors, sources, institutions and topics under CC0, served by a REST API, web app and S3 snapshot
Open sourceFree - SSRN
Elsevier-owned preprint and working-paper platform with discipline networks, author pages, download rankings and institutional research paper series, free to post and read
ProprietaryFree
Sources & verification
Primary sources consulted for this record. Claims are tied to the fields each source supports; the automated link checker re-verifies every URL on a schedule.
- Official documentationRePEc: getting the metadatachecked Nov 1, 2026
https://ideas.repec.org/getdata.html
Supports: capabilities, limitations, docs_url
- Official siteRePEc: Research Papers in Economicschecked Nov 1, 2026
http://repec.org/
Supports: name, summary, capabilities, description
HTTPS not served on this host
- Official sitechecked Nov 1, 2026
- Official sitechecked Nov 1, 2026
- Confidence
- High
- Reviewed
- Nov 1, 2026
- Links
- Verified · Nov 2, 2026
Spotted an error?
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