I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with how hard it is to keep up with new research. At some point after starting my job, I subscribed to table of contents emails for the top five + a few other econ journals. Then I noticed that, once in a while, I would see a newly published article in my research area that I had never heard about. Given that it typically takes at least 1-2 years to publish a paper in economics and that drafts are widely available as working papers, that was not a good sign.

To try to remedy that problem, I then subscribed to two working paper series: NBER and SSRN. But even that didn’t seem good enough. In environmental economics, there are plenty of good researchers who are not part of the NBER (and thus can’t release their working papers that way) and do not use SSRN. But how could I possibly remember to check all of their websites once in a while to see new papers? On top of that, my inbox was getting bombarded with abstracts of many irrelevant papers, and I was wasting a lot of my already precious time sorting through them to figure out which ones I should read.

I looked to see if there was anything out there that could help me stay up to date efficiently and sanely. I won’t bore you with the details, but places like Research Gate, Google Scholar, Mendeley, RePEc, and others fell far short of what I was looking for. So I decided to build it myself (or, more accurately, hire a programmer to build it for me) and in the process also create a tool for others who may be having the same problem. I’m calling it “Academic Sequitur”.

The idea is simple: Academic Sequitur will be a one-stop shop where you can create a “portfolio” of research to follow, whether it’s research in a specific journal, on a specific topic, or by a specific researcher. We’re starting with economics and finance but depending on how things go, we may expand to other disciplines. A beta version will be available in about 6 months, so stay tuned! And if you want to be notified of when Academic Sequitur comes out or have any other thoughts, let me know by emailing [email protected].