[RePEc-announce] RePEc in November 2003

[Bill Goffe]

Christian said:

> Abstract views are weeded from any robot and spider activity. Also we 
> limit the count to one IP address per item, thus curtailing "reload" 
> counts. So the numbers are not inflated from this.

Ah -- I forgot this.
 
> My analysis of logs files on IDEAS tells me that it is not just 
> research economists that use our web sites, but also practicing economists 
> in the industry and government, students and simply the general public. 
> And people do extensive bibliographic searches using RePEc, spending quite 
> a bit of time on our sites, and returning often. And let us not forget 
> that there are many more Economists in the world then what the AEA can 
> cover.

Interesting -- Sune said much the same. I forgot about non-economists.

The AEA was just a way of estimating the # of economists. I remembered
the approximate membership, and John Siegfried has a paper on the % of
different departments and their AEA membership (30-70%?), so could
estimate economists in the U.S. From there, maybe approximate the number
of economists by the U.S. share of world GDP (1/3). This implies ~75K
economists worldwide (not horribly off my earlier #). Finally, most
academic economists do little publishing (I've got an article in my
office on it -- glad to share if anybody wants it).

         - Bill

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