NEP Current Awareness Service of the RePEc Digital Library

• Published in: D-Lib magazine Vol. 9; no. 12
• Main Authors: Chu, Heting, Krichel, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.12.2003
• Subjects: Current awareness services; Digital libraries; Economics; Online databases; RePEc; Research Papers in Economics
• ISSN: 1082-9873; 1082-9873
• DOI: 10.1045/december2003-chu

The full text of this electronic journal article can be found at [URL:http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december03/chu/12chu.html]. NEP (New Economics Papers) is a current awareness service for the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) digital library. Since its initiation in 1998, over 56 individual lists have been created to loosely represent subfields within economics. Those lists in total made more than 37,000 announcements of about 28,000 working papers that were added to RePEc in the past five years. With several kinds of data available for NEP from May 1998 through June 2003, this study examines the development of the NEP service. The performance of NEP is then measured in terms of timeliness, coverage ratio, and usage. In exploring the various NEP parameters and their relationships, we discuss the potentials and other perspectives of the NEP service. Although it can be further improved, NEP could become an innovative model for current awareness services of digital libraries technically as well as organizationally. (Original abstract)