Christian said:
Abstract views are weeded from any robot and spider activity. Also we limit the count to one IP address per item, thus curtailing "reload" counts. So the numbers are not inflated from this.
Ah -- I forgot this.
My analysis of logs files on IDEAS tells me that it is not just research economists that use our web sites, but also practicing economists in the industry and government, students and simply the general public. And people do extensive bibliographic searches using RePEc, spending quite a bit of time on our sites, and returning often. And let us not forget that there are many more Economists in the world then what the AEA can cover.
Interesting -- Sune said much the same. I forgot about non-economists. The AEA was just a way of estimating the # of economists. I remembered the approximate membership, and John Siegfried has a paper on the % of different departments and their AEA membership (30-70%?), so could estimate economists in the U.S. From there, maybe approximate the number of economists by the U.S. share of world GDP (1/3). This implies ~75K economists worldwide (not horribly off my earlier #). Finally, most academic economists do little publishing (I've got an article in my office on it -- glad to share if anybody wants it). - Bill -- *------------------------------------------------------* | Bill Goffe goffe@oswego.edu | | Department of Economics voice: (315) 312-3444 | | SUNY Oswego fax: (315) 312-5444 | | 416 Mahar Hall <wuecon.wustl.edu/~goffe> | | Oswego, NY 13126 | *--------*------------------------------------------------------*-----------* | "Only one astronaut has ever taken the terrifying basket ride; a safety | | official who took part in that same trial run screamed all the way down." | | -- A description of riding the emergency slide from the shuttle on its | | launch pad -- it starts 200 feet off the ground and is 1,200 feet | | long. CNN, 4/5/99 | *---------------------------------------------------------------------------*