Economics Literature Search

Version Notes (v0.2.1)

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).

Why are some searches slow?

Phrase searches (using quotes) with common words like "the effect" or "we find" can be slow because PostgreSQL must check word positions across millions of text occurrences. The database contains 48,000+ papers with 600+ million words of full text.

To speed up your search:

Use specific terms — Technical phrases like "difference-in-differences" or "regression discontinuity" are fast; generic phrases like "the effect of" are slow
Limit journals — NBER alone has 27,000 papers. Excluding it (unchecked by default) reduces the corpus by more than half

Query syntax help

machine learning - Both terms (implicit AND)
"machine learning" - Exact phrase
machine or learning - Either term (OR)
regression -linear - Exclude term (NOT)
machine and learning - Explicit AND
Combine: "neural network" or bayesian -frequentist

Database Statistics