RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a group working on the provision of electronic working papers and articles. We are concerned that individuals' working paper sites are not the efficient way to disseminate scientific information. We believe that joining forces is a good thing because we can learn from each other how to do things better and promote our work together. Check the RePEc website for details.

The RePEc Author Service pursues several goals:

• Provide consistent contact information for authors. If you move, update your information here and it will be reflected in listings for all your works
• Link works with their authors' profiles, so that users can find other works by the same author.
• Distinguish works of homonyms
• Identify different versions of the same works as authors claim them as theirs.
• Establish rankings of authors and institutions.
• Provide credentials for authentication into personalized RePEc services.

Quite a lot in fact. For details, see LogEc, which covers traffic at some of the RePEc services. In addition, data collected by RePEc is used in various other services, including Econlit and Google Scholar. And you can use RePEc for your bibliographic searches too: IDEAS, EconPapers.

RePEc services use the data collected through RePEc. For a listing of them, look on the RePEc website.

The publishing institution indexes all relevant publications itself. This is not done by RePEc, which has no funding to do so. This allows RePEc services to remain free for all participants. Detailed instructions on how to proceed are available.

Make sure all your works are listed in your profile. To do so, you should have a proper set of name variations listed (once logged in click on "names"). Indeed, publishers do not have a consistent way of refering to authors. For example, John Edgar Smith may be listed as:

1. John Edgar Smith
2. John E. Smith
3. John Smith
4. J. Smith
5. J. E. Smith
6. Smith, John Edgar
7. Smith, John E.
8. Smith, John
9. Smith, J.
10. Smith, J. E.

not counting misspellings. If you fill the first, middle, and last name fields on the name variations page, and then click on the "suggestions" button, you should have a good set of relevant variations. Do not forget to "save".

Also, make sure to have links to your profile on your homepage and/or email signature.

Check out the volunteers page. There are plenty of opportunities to help in the project which is entirely volunteer driven.

RePEc is largely run by volunteers on donated or shared hardware. Various small projects have been covered by small grants.

Most RePEc services update their databases nightly. This means that an item added to the database by a local RePEc archive maintainer should be listed in the RePEc Author Service within two days. After that period, log in, click on research and ask for an automatic search, if it did not start by itself.

We want to preserve the record, of course. Alert the administrator of the RePEc Author Service, along with the date of death if you know it. The account will then be curated by a volunteer, and the date of death will be recorded as well. A directory of deceased authors is available.

This has to do with the incorrect character encoding in the files we are receiving from publishers. The issue is explained in more detail in this blog post. Every page has a contact email for corrections, use that to alert the publisher about it.