Next Steps in the Information Infrastructure in Economics∗

This paper updates Goffe and Parks (1997), which examined the Internet infrastructure of the economics profession and advocated changes to it. Much that was predicted and advocated in that paper has come to pass, yet the fundamentals of economic discourse have changed little. Rather than just proposing revolutionary changes, this paper explores the adoption of the most successful Internet service for economists to date, “Research Papers in Economics ” (RePEc), which currently has metadata on more than 568,000 items. This paper next explores the reasons for its success and then studies how publication practices have changed in the profession. In this light, it then proposes new information technologies to improve the productivity of the profession.