Confwatcher: a tool for economists to make the search for conferences and special issues more efficient and transparent

Hundreds of conferences, seminars and workshops in economics are organized worldwide every year. Being able to get a full information on their content and dates, in a more efficient and transparent way, is key for economists as it should enable them to submit their papers in the right places, and then publish them in better conditions, especially when the event is linked to a special issue. Conversely, for organizers, making sure that most publicity is made and that economists who have written interesting papers in the scope of the event have the information and may then envisage to submit their articles is important to match the expected standard of the event. Using datascience technics (web-scraping and text analysis), Confwatcher is a tool that proposes a simple interface to identify conferences with call for papers (and possibly special issues) among institutions (central banks, international organizations, research centers, journals, economists' associations…) that propose most high-quality events.