Current Awareness Service of the RePEc Digital Library: Progress, Performance and Potentials

NEP (New Economics Papers) is a current awareness service for the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) digital library. Since its initiation in April 1998, over 50 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. This article examines the growth and development of the NEP service. The performance of NEP is 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