RepEc database inclusion

Features
1

I’ve searched the forum with “repec” keyword, and found no feature request about it. RepEc is the largest working paper repository in economics field. It also includes bibliographic info of published papers. Here their size of the database in their words:
"over 1,800 archives from 89 countries have contributed about 2 million research pieces from 2,300 journals and 4,300 working paper series"
The web site: http://repec.org
For economists it is a must.
I think it should be easy to include that database in Jabref web search.

Please vote if you support this proposal:

  • I would like to have this feature, too!
  • I don’t care.

0 voters

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2

Thanks for your suggestion. Please note that the web page you linked above states that the RepEc database is indexed by Google Scholar. Since we have a Google Scholar fetcher, you should be able to access the articles in it right now.

Therefore, I see little reason to implement another extension to the web search.

3

I’d also prefer if RepEc would be directly included in the web search! It is a must for economist, and Google Scholar is not a good substitute.

More specifically, while it is true that RepEc is indexed by Google Scholar, the bibtex-file on RepEc contains more content than the one via Google Scholar. E.g. Google Scholar often does not contain the abstract, doi and URL (Or am I doing something wrong?)

4

@floriankaulich No, you are probably right. The data provided by Google Scholar is often not as complete as we would like it to be.

So, if someone is willing to implement a web search function in JabRef, I think we would include it.

Looking at the repec website though, I have to say that I have a hard time finding an actual search interface. There are several services listed, but they seem to be on separate data sets? Where do people actually search repec data? What URL do they use?

5

@joerg.lenhard I guess most people use the search interface of IDEAS RepEc: https://ideas.repec.org/

I don’t know how JabRef could access the RepEc database, but maybe there is something useful on this site: https://ideas.repec.org/getdata.html

6

While JabRef has no fetcher for that, it has an importer for it. So if you somehow download the recep files, you can import them with JabRef

I recently stumbled across the import format (never heard of it before).

Regards
Christoph

7

@Siedlerchr Thanks for pointing out this importer, which I wasn’t aware of.

However, the only importer that I can find is for RePEc NEP, which stands for “RePEc New Economic Papers”. That’s a weekly e-mail newsletter with a list of new papers on a chosen topic.

I presume the idea is to import the entire list from an email into JabRef. While this might be a useful tool by itself, it is not a substitute for a database inclusion.

In general, the issue is not about importing at all, because RePEc entries can be exported as BibTex files and then manually pasted into a JabRef bibliography. What I (and many others) wish for is a fetcher that automatises this task.