Recommendations for RePec ranking optimization

In one it’s recent posts, the RePEc team has released some recommendations for Authors and Institutions to make better use of  their ranking positions. As RePEc rankings are increasingly popular among the Econonomics research community, this seems to be very good approach. Compared  to other rankings RePEc is quite transparent about the methods used to compile it’s charts.

EconStor now in RePec TOP 10

Latest statistics sees EconStor among the ten most heavily used archives in RePec

Most Economists know, that RePEc publishes rankings on publications, authors and research institutions.  Less known is the fact, that RePec also provides statistics on it’s contributing archives and how they perform. These archives can come from university faculties (e.g. for their working papers), from publishers (for their journals) or from repositories (either institutional or subject based). A ranking of the largest archives is provided on the RePEc homepage (see also screenshot on the right).

As a subject repository with a focus on the German Economics community EconStor provides it’s RePEc input services for over 100 institutions, which places as amont the TOP 20 archives with respect to size.

But even more pleasant (and also more important to our customers) is the fact, that papers on EconStor are also heavily used. Looking at the detailed LogEc statistics for all contributing archives in RePEc, we find that EconStor (acronym “zbw”) is at number 10 concerning the use of our archives (number of downloads).

Webometrics Ranking confirms: EconStor among the 20 biggest Repositories worldwide

New edition of webometrics ranking now also includes Altmetrics indicators. EconStor ranks at number 17 concerning full-text documents.

The “Ranking Web of Repositories” is a service provided by the Spanish Reseseach Organization CSIC. Besides comparing repositories it also ranks Universities, Business Schools and Hospitals. The repository ranking is published every 6 months, now in it’s 14th edition.

The latest edition, which was published this week, introduced a new element among the relevant criteria for the ranking: The “Altmetrics”-Element (which accounts for 25% of the ranking) is monitoring services like Twitter, Wikipedia and Google+ and looks up, how often repository documents are mentioned in these service.

The new Webometrics repository ranking sees EconStor at number 45 (out of 1750 repositories worldwide) in the overall ranking. When it comes to the number of PDF-Documents within a repository (category “rich files”), EconStor comes out even better at Number 17. Concerning the coverage in Google Scholar, we rank at number 21.

EconStor climbs to number 29 in new Webometrics repository ranking

New edition of webometrics ranking compares over 1700 repositories worldwide according to several categories.

The “Ranking Web of Repositories” is a service provided by the Spanish Reseseach Organization CSIC. Besides comparing repositories it also ranks Universities, Business Schools and Hospitals. The repository ranking is published every 6 months, now in it’s 13th edition.

Compared to earlier rankings EconStor has climbed several places and now ranks at number 29 worldwide, climbing almost 50 places (from number 77) within one year! And in the European Repository ranking EconStor now stands at number 11.

The TOP5 positions of the ranking are also held by subject based repositories or databases (ArXiv, RePEc, PubMed Central, Citeseer and SSRN).

EconStor among the TOP25 repositories in Europe

New edition of webometrics ranking compares repositories worldwide and by region according to several categories.

The “Ranking Web of Repositories” is a service provided by the Spanish Reseseach Organization CSIC. Besides comparing repositories it also ranks Universities, Business Schools and Hospitals. The repository ranking is published every 6 months, now in it’s 12th edition.

Compared to earlier rankings EconStor has climbed several places and now ranks at number 52 worldwide, with the TOP positions held by SSRN, ArXiv and the NASA Astrophysics Data System. Looking at fulltext content only (category “rich files”), EconStor fares even better, being now number 15 worldwide and number 7 in Europe.

IZA launches 5 new Open Access Journals

The number of interesting new Open Access Journals in Economics increases, as IZA launches five new field journals

The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) is a private research institute, based in Germany, with the focus on labour market research. They are already editing a prominent Discussion Paper Series (also available on EconStor), which belongs to to the TOP 20 Working Paper Series in RePEc.

On top of that IZA has now started five new Open Access Journals, which focus on the different aspects of Labour Markets:

• IZA Journal of Labor Economics
• IZA Journal of Labor Policy
• IZA Journal of Migration
• IZA Journal of Labor & Development
• IZA Journal of European Labor Studies

All Journals are published with SpringerOpen and do not charge any author fees. Each journal involves peer reviewing, with the focus on a fast decision making and publication process:

Acceptance/rejection decisions are expected to be made “within one month; publication is expected “within two months after submission of the final manuscript.The fast process from the submission to the acceptance/rejection decision is guaranteed by (i) an advanced desk rejection policy and (ii) the fact that only those papers refereed that require minor revisions are accepted while those not accepted are rejected without a detailed referee report. This requires the submission of manuscripts that are considered ready by the author/s for direct publication if found suitable by the editorial team.

With the reputation of the Discussion Paper Series already established, there might be a good chance also for the Journals to enter the ranking lists.

IZA paper provides new ranking for German Economic Research Institutes

A new IZA paper by Rolf Ketzler and Klaus F Zimmermann presents a ranking for German economic research institutes (all part of the Leibniz Association) based on their publications in SSCI-Journals from 2000-2009.

In the results of the raw data, ZEW Mannheim holds the leading position with 1,511 citations, followed by DIW Berlin (1,189 citations),  ifo Munich (753 citations), IfW Kiel (593 citations), RWI Essen (382 citations) and IWH Halle (90 citations).

The authors also found an employer and publisher bias among the cites of published articles of research staff from the German research institutes: If from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), articles have significantly more cites than if from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) or one of the others. If published in a Springer journal, the articles receive more cites than with Blackwell, and if published with Sage, the articles receive significantly less cites than with Blackwell.

Handelsblatt Ranking causes uproar among German Business Economists

The German Business Newspaper Handelsblatt publishes annual rankings on German Economists and Business Economists based on their publication output. This years ranking (which was published today), caused a big uproar beforehand among  researchers. As a result, over 300 Professors (about 11% of all Business Economists In Germany) opted out, which means, that they are no longer included in the ranking.  This seems quite a number but, looking at the research output of  the boycotteurs in more detail, one finds out, that most of  them are not very active in publishing research articles, in fact only about 6-7% are among  the TOP100 of the Handelsblatt Ranking.

Nevertheless this behaviour brought up a national debate about the sense and nonsense of rankings and the right parameters to choose for evaluation. Most of this debate is unfortunately available only in German, but there are also a few English blogposts out there, e.g. from the “Lumpy Economist” and “Econ Tidbits”.

EconStor is now among the TOP20 RePEc archives

Increased visibility for German research publications in Economics

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is the most important database for publications in economics, currently holding more than one million bibliographic records. Many of the documents are in Open Access and therefore freely accessible on the internet. The RePEc database has a worldwide scope and offers researchers and institutions relevant functions such as citation analysis, alerting services and rankings to measure their research output and its impact. Renowned academic publishers such as Elsevier, Blackwell-Wiley and Springer also use the database as a multiplier for their journals. Moreover, RePEc is the largest scholars’ network in its field with more than 30,000 registered economic researchers.

As a national service institution for RePEc, the Open Access publication server EconStor organises the publication records for nearly one hundred German institutions and advises them and their researchers on the optimal use of RePEc. This service is free of charge and includes not only the uploads of publications but also the provision and processing of the title data such as abstracts, author keywords and classifications. Based on publication agreements with the institutions, publications are permanently archived on EconStor and made available in Open Access. Documents are searchable not only in RePEc, but also in Google and other economic portals such as EconBiz and Economists Online.

Publications from economics faculties at universities, but also from research institutes of the Leibniz Association, the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the Helmholtz Association and the German research association Verein für Socialpolitik add up to more than 32,000 titles in EconStor. Among these publications are working and discussion papers, journal articles and conference contributions. The RePEc service of EconStor was initially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is now sustainably maintained by a team of ZBW experts.