Content area
Full Text
All three reviews in this issue focus on economic literature databases. Economics has been the turf of the EconLit database for decades. In the past few years, however, there have been many projects to make at least the abstracts of substantial economic research papers freely available through the Web. One of the most successful of the international collaborative efforts is the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) archive, which is being implemented with different features by talented economists and programmers in many countries as varied as Sweden, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S.
My first pick is IDEAS, one of the many excellent implementations of the RePEc collection of free abstracts for more than 200,000 journal articles, working papers, books, book chapters, and software. Over half of the abstracts have links to the full-text digital version. The other pick is a spectacularly well-implemented bibliometric service that delivers very informative statistics about the papers, journals, series, and authors in RePEc. The pan is the American Economic Association's EconLit database, which is widely licensed by many college libraries and research centers, but is becoming increasingly less and less state of the art.
IDEAS
It was not easy to choose my pick of the several excellent RePEc implementations. Considering all the features, IDEAS, by the Department of Economics at Connecticut University [http://ideas.repec.org/], is my favorite. It is a labor of love by associate professor Christian Zimmermann, who is also the brain behind the EDIRC (Economics Departments, Institutes and Research Centers in the World) database, which contains information on about 7,770 institutions, making it a potential pick in and by itself.
Instead of trying to describe the richness of this version of RePEc, let me reproduce one of the overview statistics of IDEAS. This is the kind of information I begged for in a guest editorial on database nutrition labeling over a decade ago ("A Proposal for Database 'Nutrition and Ingredient' Labeling," DATABASE, February 1993, pp. 7-9).
The size of the database is impressive, and so is the fact that more than half of its records have abstracts. Very importantly, 56 percent of the records link to the full-text documents (although only a fraction of them are open access), Still, most users at research libraries are likely to have a...