The problem

RePEc intro

Finding a topic

Finding the core papers

For the experienced user

The problem

1. Undergraduate student with an essay requirement
2. Tempted to use Google and/or Wikipedia for literature search
3. Not yet able to discriminate good and bad literature

RePEc intro

1. Research Papers in Economics
2. Open bibliography of economics literature
3. Entirely volunteer driven
4. 2000 participating publishers, 3000 journals, 5000 working paper series, 3 million research items
5. Metadata in public domain, RePEc services provide it to public
6. Most popular: EconPapers, IDEAS
7. Also: Google Scholar, ProQuest, EconLit, ResearchGate, etc.

Why use RePEc

1. Freely available from anywhere
2. Focused on Economics (academic and policy)
3. Hurdles preventing bogus research to be indexed
4. Ways to find what is more important
5. Often has link to open access version
6. And more useful links (see below)

Finding a topic

1. Browsing JEL codes
2. Search with keywords
3. Browsing most cited papers
4. What economic blogs talk about
5. Random paper

Finding the core papers

• What is the most important research?
• Key: understand how citation counts matter
• Navigate references (forward) and citations (backward)
• Recognize papers and authors that keep appearing
• Search, sorting by citations

For the experienced user

• NEP alerts
• MyIDEAS
• In development: RePEc Biblio