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FAQ for authors registered in RePEc

Rankings

1. How are rankings computed?

   We computed 31 different rankings accordings to 31 different criteria, and then aggregate them up (after removing the best and the worst) using a harmonic mean of the rank orders. To see the different criteria and the rankings for everyone of them, see the top 5% authors. Click on each column header for a different method. You can also compute alternative rankings by aggregating the rankings differently or choosing a different set of criteria here. Finally, a document describes in detail the ranking procedures.

2. The link to my ranking in the monthly email does not work. Why?

   The link expires once the next mailing is being sent. Watch your email. Note that you will only get the new link if the email in your profile is current. Please keep in mind that the mailing can take a whole week to prevent an overload of our servers as people check their ranking analysis or their profile.

3. How can I improve my ranking?
   1. Write more papers. But you knew that.
   2. Make sure your papers are listed on RePEc. If your department is not yet participating with its working paper series, here are the instructions. Also encourage journals that do not yet participate to do the same.
   3. Make sure all your works are listed in your profile. That maximizes your chances of having works cited and contributes to your abstract views and download totals. In particular, do not remove from your profile old versions of your works. This would not remove them from the database, just from your profile. In addition, working paper series often have a higher impact factor than journals.
   4. Make sure your name variations in your profile are accurate, that is they cover all possible ways a publisher may call you.
   5. We only add citations when we have a high degree in confidence that they correspond to the proper work. For lower degrees of confidence, you can help in determining whether they cite the right work. Log into your profile and click on citations and see what is offered.
   6. If you have a homepage, link to your profile on IDEAS or EconPapers, and/or put such links in your email signature.
4. How is the citation count performed?

   Reference extraction and citation linking is done by the CitEc project. See there for details. This data is then used, discarding self-citations and citations by different version of the same paper, to compute totals. There is also a RePEc Blog post that can be of interest.

5. Can I get the rankings of someone else?

   Not from us. Ask this person directly, we consider rankings to be private, except for the top 5% who have every reason to be proud of being listed.

6. My citation count went down. How is this possible?

   This can happen when you remove items from your profile, when a publisher removes some items from the database (either refering or citing), or when we notice that two citing or cited papers are different versions of the same work. It can also happen that we remove wrongly attributed citations (something you can also do: log into your profile, then click on "citations" and "identified").

7. Why is my citation count in RePEc lower than in other services?

   References are only extracted from papers that are available online freely and could be parsed. We have no budget, and thus do not purchase such data or subscriptions. Some commercial publishers explicitely prohibit us from displaying references, as they are considered by them as part of the copyrighted work. Others see the value of getting links to their works and provide us directly with references. As you see, things are very uneven, and unless publishers can be convinced to release more of their records to the public, we are bound to analyze mostly working papers, which is mostly recent material (and thus added value compared to services that only look at articles). If we were not publishing the reference lists, just making counts, numbers would be higher, but our service would be much degraded by the lack of crosslinking of references. For more details about the citation analysis, see CitEc or this RePEc Blog post.
   Note that we only include citations for which we have a high confidence that they match the appropriate paper. For those with lower levels of confidence, you can help us: log into your profile, click on "citations", and approve or reject our suggestions.

Comments and additions about your own experience are welcome. Send them to Christian Zimmermann.