Economics Literature Search

Version Notes (v0.3.1)

v0.3.1 — Search results now show a replication-data badge for papers tracked in the AEA Replication Tracker (~3,900 papers, mostly AER and AEJs). The badge links to the openICPSR archive; hover to see the analyst's notes on whether data are complete, partial, or missing. CSV exports now include Replication Status and Replication URL columns.

v0.3.0 — Search is now powered by Meilisearch, making queries dramatically faster — even broad or full-text searches return in under a second. Added or syntax for alternatives (e.g. "shift-share" or "bartik" returns papers matching either phrase).

v0.2.1 — Interactive trend graph controls: adjust year range, toggle between aggregate and per-journal views, show/hide length-adjusted frequency line, and select individual journals to display. All filtering happens client-side for instant updates without additional API calls.

v0.2.0 — Fixed search performance issues (queries now ~50x faster). Fixed bug where trend graph and search results used different search scopes. Improved exact phrase matching for quoted terms. Added Journal of Econometrics. Cleaned metadata (removed HTML/XML tags from titles and abstracts). Extracted ~3,800 missing abstracts from full text PDFs.

v0.1.0 — Fixed JFE data issues; JPE data mostly updated (some gaps remain). Added citation counts from OpenAlex to the database. New option to display citation-weighted trend curves, which weight papers by their share of citations within each year.

v0.0.2a — Added Journal of Finance (JF), Journal of Financial Economics (JFE), Review of Financial Studies (RFS), Journal of Political Economy (JPE), and Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE).

Query syntax & tips

machine learning — both terms (implicit AND).
"difference-in-differences" — exact phrase. Wrap in quotes. Punctuation inside the quotes is a word separator, so "difference-in-differences" also matches difference in differences.
"shift-share" or "bartik" — either phrase. Chains work: foo or bar or baz.
Phrases are literal — there is no stemming inside quotes, so "difference-in-difference" will not match "difference-in-differences". To cover both spellings, combine with or: "difference-in-difference" or "difference-in-differences".
Use the journal checkboxes and year range below. NBER is unchecked by default (roughly half the corpus).

Covers titles, abstracts, authors, journal names, and full text (41,000+ papers with bodies). Case-insensitive. Full-corpus searches complete in well under a second.

Selecting all includes NBER (~half the corpus); searches will be slower.

Database Statistics