Wednesday, January 18, 2012

ResearchGate Revisited

Back in 2010 I blogged briefly about ResearchGate. Today, I saw this article in the New York Times heavily featuring the site. I wonder if they sent a press release to the NYT that triggered this article? Anyway, I decided I should set up a profile on ResearchGate. I only managed to find two of my papers via their search engine - both from 2011. I wasn't impressed. I have a unique academic name (No other academic has both these initials together with my surname: D. I. Stern) so it shouldn't be too hard. I found two economists at ANU on the site already. Searches for "environmental economics" and "energy economics" didn't bring up anyone else I knew. So I'm not impressed and won't visit this site very often.

In a follow up to the NYT article, Krugman discusses how things work in economics and how it's changed. Back in 1993 when I was a post-doc at York part of my job was setting up working papers exchanges with other institutions. We'd mail them our papers if they'd mail us theirs. Soon after that, WoPEc, the predecessor of RePEc, got started and I've been involved with that ever since.

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