RePEc

Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in countries across the world to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components, all maintained by volunteers. The collected data are then used in various services that serve the collected metadata to users or enhance it.

Publishers -- such as academic institutions, journals or individual authors -- index their content themselves into RePEc by hosting metadata about the content on their website or a FTP site using a structure format defined by RePEc. The syntax of the metadata template syntax is guided by Research Documents Information Format (ReDIF). Once a metadata archive is created, the publisher submits this archive to RePEc, and the index is included in the RePEc repository. If you were doing this manually, RePEc provides a step-by-step guide.

This Drupal module enables an authorized Drupal user to associate a content type in Drupal with a RePEc metadata template.

Once the content type has been associated, the module enables the administrator to associate specific fields in the content type with fields that can appear in the RePEc metadata template. Once these associations are saved, the module then generates a metadata summary file (.RDX) and a set of metadata files (.RDF) in a specified directory and ReDIF format that are understood by RePEc's search agent and indexing system. As a user creates, edits, or deletes nodes of this content type, the module will update the index file, and the list of .RDF files so that RePEc can update its repository when when the files are next indexed by RePEc.

In order to publish your content in with RePEc, you need to obtain an RePEc archive handle, which also becomes the root directory name for your RePEc files. Once your handle and local repository is setup, RePEc indexes your archives and updates information in the RePEc repository approximately daily.

Finally, since this module was created to solve a specific problem, at this there exists a RePEc template for "Working Papers" as a possible selection in the module for metadata mapping with a content type. RePEc has a much richer set of available templates that can be added as additional templates using the working papers as an example.

This project was supported by Urban Insight and USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.