Searching for Economics; Joking with Economists.

ELECTRONIC information resources; ECONOMICS; DATABASES; INFORMATION resources

This article provides information on electronic information resources on economics in the U.S. The traditional bastion of scholarly literature in economics has been EconLit, the database of the American Economics Association. It indexes six document types: journal articles, books, collective volume articles, dissertations, working papers and book reviews. It is not just an index database, but also contains abstracts and some full text. NetEc, the network for economists, began as an international academic effort to improve the communication of economics via electronic media and took full advantage of Internet technology. The scholarly literature in economics frequently involves working papers, the pre-prints of the academic economic research community. These working papers are collected in RePEc, which is a free, open access source. The largest contributors are listed at the site and include universities, publishers and governmental bodies. The National Association for Business Economics acts as a portal to the profession. Not only does it provide on its home page news of interest to economists, it also has links to useful and interesting information in the field of business economics.