[RePEc-announce] RePEc in December 2020 and a look back at 2020

[Christian Zimmermann]

We finished the year by adding a simple new tool that allows to select an 
economists according to several criteria, for example to find a seminar 
speaker. We counted 540,369 file downloads and 3,223,421 abstract views 
and welcomed the following new RePEc archives: Malopolska School of 
Economics, Russian Foreign Trade Academy, George Mason University.

Now regarding the year as a whole, 2020 was despite the circumstances a 
very satisfactory year. We counted the most abstract views ever over the 
span of a year, we surpassed 1 million indexed working papers, our 
citation analysis project made great strides, we added about 375,000 works 
to the index, about 3,500 authors registered, and 62 new RePEc archives 
started indexed their material. CollEc, the co-author network project, got 
a complete overhaul.

We are very encouraged by this increase in traffic. Over several year 
years, we have seen a decrease in traffic to the RePEc sites that report 
these numbers. Note that there has been also an increasing number of other 
sites that leverage RePEc data, but do not report such numbers. This made 
it difficult to evaluate how well we are doing overall. The new record 
*measured* traffic is a very positive signal.

Of course, this was also a special year because of the pandemic. This gave 
rise to a flood of papers about Covid-19, about 9000 to date in RePEc. The 
circumstances also called for the creation of an Economics Virtual Seminar 
Calendar that disseminated over 750 seminars.


Christian Zimmermann                          FIGUGEGL!
Economic Research
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
P.O. Box 442
St. Louis MO 63166-0442 USA
https://ideas.repec.org/zimm/   @CZimm_economist