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Accessing economic research on Bangladesh

Marco Novarese, Quentin Wodon and Christian Zimmermann
A quiet revolution has taken place regarding access to economic research, and this revolution is especially important for economists in developing countries such as Bangladesh. Ten years ago, it would have been difficult for a Bangladeshi researcher or policy makers to benefit from easy access to the recent economics literature relevant to his/her job, be it related to monetary policy or the fight against poverty.
Due in part to a rapid increase in the number of economics journals, most libraries could not afford to carry print versions of the many specialised journals that are needed to keep abreast of development in one’s field. Beyond journals, access to working papers is also important, and working paper series were even more » difficult to access than journals.
Today, by contrast, thanks to the power of the web, amazing resources are now
available for free through websites such as SSRN (Social Science Research Network at www.ssm.com) or RePEc (Research Papers inEconomics.atwww.repec.org). RePEcis probably the website of choice for economists with (as of the end of February 2009) 712,000 items of interest. This includes 282,000 working papers, 422,000 journal articles, 1,700 software components, and 5,000 book and chapter listings. Some 19,300 authors are listed on the website, with their detailed contact information and publication listings. The site also includes 11,100 institutional contact listings.
Typing "Bangladesh" in the RePEc website generates about 1,000 hits in terms of economics papers related to the country. More than half of those papers are less than five year old and many are working papers which can be downloaded right away. By contrast, due to publication delays, journal articles often lag behind the frontier of research, which is why researchers rely more on working papers to learn
about new developments in their field. Sites such as RePEc are, therefore, unique resources for researchers as well as for university students, and having one's work listed on RePEc can help for dissemination even for well established authors.
Apart from providing information on institutions conducting research and economists, RePEc also provides valuable services, such as NEP -- the New Economics Papers. Individuals can register with NEP and receive byemail information on the latest research in their field every’ week. There are more than 80 different NEP reports that one can subscribe to. Typically, a weekly report in one field would contain ten to fifteen new papers, all of which can be downloaded for free. The service is free because as for other components of the RePEc website, NEP is run entirely by volunteers who provide their time to edit the weekly NEP reports.
While sites such as RePEc should be of special interest to economists in developing countries because of the possibility of accessing a huge database of economics papers for free, it turns out that to this day, participation from developing countries to the RePEc effort remains limited. Bangladesh is no exception. One of die services that RePEc provides is a list of institutions that conduct economic research in any given country. For Bangladesh, RePEc lists 27 research institutions located in the country (there are without doubt many
more). Yet, to date less than twenty individual researchers from those institutions have registered with RePEc.
This means that the work of Bangladeshi researchers, which is substantial, is not well disseminated. This does not need to be. First, Bangladeshi institutions that have working paper series can register the series with RePEc. Second, even when researchers belong to institutions without well-established working paper series, it is easy for the researchers not only to register with RePEC but also to post their work on the site through yet another tool - the Munich Personal RePEc Archive, or MPRA.
MPRA accepts submissions of working papers from anybody in the world, which makes it feasible for researchers whose institution may not have an established working papers series to make their work known both within their country and abroad. MPRA papers are subject to a light review process before being posted to the web in order to avoid non-academic submissions. But once a paper is posted, it is available to all.
RePEc can also used to evaluate the impact of research. Authors who register to the site benefit from a monthly update providing information on how well they are ranked in terms of both the quantity and the quality of their research. An author's ranking depends on criteria such as where the author publishes his/her
work, how often the author is cited, and how many times the author's papers are downloaded. This information can be helpful for a researcher in assessing the impact of his/her work and deciding where to focus his/her efforts. The information can also be valuable for institutions, as one of the criteria that can be used for promotion decisions.
The web is a revolutionary force for democracy and openness. With RePEc, this is certainly the case within the economics profession. The services that RePEc pro-
Marco Novarese (University del Piemonte Orientate), Quentin Wodon (World Bank), and Christian Zimmermann (University of Connecticut)
vides should be especially valuable in devel-oping countries, where other means of access to the economics literature are limited. But for these benefits to be fully reaped in Bangladesh, it will be necessary for more Bangladeshi researchers to register with RePEc, use the site's services to quickly learn about the new research being conducted in their fields, and make their own works better known.