Econ People is a search engine for economists rather than papers. You describe a research topic, or paste an abstract, and it finds researchers whose published work matches. Under the hood it runs a semantic search over a large database of economics papers and rolls the matching papers up to their authors. The papers that drove each match are shown as evidence on every author card, so you can verify why someone appears in the results.

The site combines three public sources:

• RePEc Author Service: the registry where roughly 84,000 economists maintain their own profiles, covering name, current affiliation, homepage and the list of works they claim as theirs. This is the backbone of every author profile here.
• RePEc paper metadata: the same curated corpus of about 250 major journals and working paper series that powers the semantic paper search. It supplies abstracts, embeddings and citation data for the in-corpus papers of each author.
• Wikidata: optional profile extras such as a photo, education, doctoral advisors and students, awards, and links to ORCID or Google Scholar. These are only available for the subset of authors whose Wikidata entry is linked to their RePEc author ID.

Affiliations are taken exclusively from the author's own RePEc Author Service registration, never from Wikidata or any other source. If an affiliation looks out of date, the author can update it themselves at authors.repec.org, and the change will appear here after the next data update.

There are two common reasons:

• The person is not registered with the RePEc Author Service. Only registered authors are included; there is no automatic name matching for unregistered authors.
• Their work falls outside the curated journal subset. The search can only match against papers that are in the database, so authors publishing mainly in outlets not covered here will rank low or not appear.

The search first finds the papers that best match your query, then aggregates them by author. Three ranking modes control the aggregation:

• Most papers: favours authors with many matching papers, good for finding people who work broadly in an area.
• Best match: favours authors of the single closest papers, good for very specific topics.
• Balanced: a blend of both.

The optional citation boost additionally weighs in how widely cited an author's matching work is.

Photos, education, academic genealogy and awards come from Wikidata. If something is wrong, the cleanest fix is to correct the underlying Wikidata entry, which benefits every site that uses it. You can also email eduard.bruell@zew.de and I will look into it.

Saved searches are stored so shared links keep working. For maintenance and performance monitoring the backend keeps lightweight statistical logs:

• IP address
• A hash of the query text (not the text itself)
• Number of authors returned
• Top three author identifiers
• Ranking mode and filter flags used
• Response time

These entries support debugging and quality improvements. They are not shared with third parties.

Please send corrections, feedback or unexpected results to eduard.bruell@zew.de.