RePEc archive step-by-step tutorial

The goal of this tutorial is to help you build a RePEc archive for your department or institution. With such an archive, your institution's publications will be listed on RePEc and its various services, like the web-based bibliographic databases, alerting email lists, citation analysis, and services for authors. See RePEc for details about these services and LogEc for numbers on current usage. In 2021, we served more than 36 million abstract views and 6 million file downloads (for the few RePEc services that report such statistics). Even the best known economist is likely to see increased visibility of his work by if it is available via RePEc given how many economists use it.

You can simplify your life by using PaperTool, which allows to manage a working paper series in AWS, including the management of the corresponding RePEc data.

Note that these instructions are meant to be for an institutional archive. A RePEc archive is not meant to be a personal archive. If you are an individual who cannot benefit from an institutional RePEc archive and still want you works to be listed in RePEc, use Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA).

Also, if you already have a RePEc archive and only wish to add a series or learn more about the syntax, do not ask for a new archive code. If you are taking over an existing archive, these shorter instructions may be sufficient for you.

The principle

You will supply information about your publications with the help of metadata--like that used by a library "card catalogue" to describe the library's contents. To produce the metadata, you will describe each of the publications, using a simple format, in an ordinary text (ASCII) file using any text editing program. (Note that word processing is different than text editing -- the former includes many invisible formatting codes for fonts, centering, etc., while the latter basically just has letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Programs like Microsoft Word have some difficulty producing text files. It is better to use programs such as Notepad, winedit or emacs. The metadata files will reside on your server, and RePEc services regularly visit your server to check for additions, changes and deletions and then integrate them in their displays. On the RePEc side, all this is done automatically and usually daily.

The tutorial will guide you through the set-up of the metadata files as well as how to prepare your server, if necessary. If you prefer to read through terse documentation, this is also available. You can also have a look at a live RePEc archive or a walkthrough of this archive. Note you may see error message for links with an .rdf extension: right click in such page to view the source code.

Note that if you already have your bibliographic metadata in some database, you may want to take advantage of some existing scripts that can help you convert the data. See this blog post. Archive maintainers may find this particularly useful: a text editor that understands the tempates used in RePEc. If you are using the OJS platform, this commercial product may be useful.

Overview of steps

The tutorial will guide you through the set-up of the metadata files as well as how to prepare your server, if necessary. If you prefer to read through terse documentation, this is also available:
  1. Get an archive code
  2. Prepare your server to host metadata
  3. Prepare metadata about your archive
  4. Prepare metadata about your series or journal(s)
  5. Prepare metadata about your individual items (working papers, articles, etc.)
  6. Alert RePEc when some data can be integrated in our services
So let us start! Use the links below.

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