Citations in Economics : FAQ

CitEc stands for Citations in Economics. CitEc provides citation analysis for documents distributed in the RePEc digital library. In this way we know which documents have been cited, how many times and what the citing documents are.

1.2.- How does CitEc work?

For each document made freely available in electronic format we try to extract its list of references. Then we look though the list of references to find citations to documents in RePEc. The process is automated and therefore makes mistakes. [see more info]

1.3.- How often is CitEc updated?

CitEc is updated once a month.

1.4.- Is there any relationship between CitEc and IDEAS or EconPapers?

Yes. CitEc generates citation data for documents available in RePEc. CitEc's data is freely available. It is used by other RePEc services like IDEAS or EconPapers. Usually people will use the data generated by CitEc trough one of such user services not directly on the CitEc web site.

1.5.- Is there any relationship between CitEc and RAS?

Yes. Data generated by CitEc is then used in RAS to allow registered authors to correct and complete their personal citations profile. Once authors have added citations to their profile, data is distributed to the different user services (IDEAS, EconPapers, etc) Citations added by authors using RAS are distributed to the RePEc user services in a weekly basis. That means that such citations take about a week to be shown in IDEAS and EconPapers and can explain differences in citation counts between services.

1.6.- Who is the brain behind CitEc?

CitEc was created by Jose Manuel Barrueco Cruz. He maintains it. He has some humble disciples who occasionally help.

2.- Information for RePEc archive maintainers

2.1.- How can I know the processing status of my documents?

Go to the archives maintainers page and enter the handle of your RePEc series or archive

2.2.- Papers in my archive have not been processed or have been processed incorrectly, what can I do?

Use the X-File-Ref field in your templates. The value of this field must be a valid URL of an ASCII file containing the references of the paper described by the template. For example:

X-File-Ref: http://www.economicdynamics.org/RePEc/red/issued/v2y1999i1p104-136.txt

X-File-Ref: http://www.economicdynamics.org/RePEc/red/issued/05-37.txt

[see more info]

2.3.- My papers are not open access but I want them to be processed by CitEc, what can I do?

Some publishers are collaborating with us in this way, please get in contact with barrueco at uv.es.

3.- Information for researchers

3.1.- Why Google Scholar does show more citations to my documents than CitEc?

CitEc has narrower criteria for citation matches, thus having fewer errors than Google Scholar. Also, the coverage of CitEc is narrower than Google Scholar's. CitEc process only electronic documents distributed in RePEc which are available in open access on the Internet. For those journals that are available only under suscription, some publishers (like bepress, CEPR or T&F) give us references metadata of the articles they publish. In the other side, some publishers (like Elsevier) explicitely prohibit us from showing references cited in their journals. They see CitEc as a potential rival for their own product: Scopus. We encourage editors to collaborate with us in order to increase the data set of references. You may see the current CitEc's coverage at the source data page.

3.2.- Why the references cited in my documents are not shown in CitEc?

There are several conditions a document must fulfil to be analysed by CitEc:

to be available in electronic format
to be freely available on the Internet
to be in PDF or PostScript formats
the URL provided should point to the document itself, not to an intermediate abstract page
it should be possible to convert the PDF file into ASCII format
our software should be able to recognise the references

[see more info]

3.3.- What can I do if the references cited in my document are nor shown in CitEc?

We can add manually references to the system. If your paper fails to be automatically processed you can submit its references list using our user input form.

3.4.- I know that my article has been cited but these citations cannot be seen from IDEAS. What's going on?

There may be missing citations in the data set. In order to identify missing citations, first check that both citing and cited documents are available in RePEc. Secondly be sure that the citing document has been processed by CitEc, that is, that its description page in IDEAS or EconPapers has a References section. If this is the case go to next answer, otherwise you can send us the full list of references of the citing document as explained in the previous question.

3.5.- How can I add a citation to CitEc?

Register with RAS and use the search engine to add citations to your profile. If that process fails, check that the citation you want to add is actually missing (see previous answer) then send us an email to barrueco at uv.es with details of the citing and cited documents. Always include in the mails the RePEc handles for both documents.

3.6.- Why do the citation numbers on the RePEc Author Service and CitEc differ?

CitEc and RAS use two databases that are synchronised daily. There may be small periods of time when the number of citations are different. If the difference persists more than two days, get in contact with barrueco @ uv dot es.