Assessing a human mediated current awareness service
This work provides insights for improving human-mediated current awareness services in economics, but it is incremental as it applies existing analysis methods to a specific dataset.
The study analyzed editor behavior in the NEP current awareness service using data from 38,000 issues over ten years, finding that report success is primarily influenced by topic, subscriber count, and editor promotion efforts, with average issue size at 12.4 documents and editing time at 14.5 minutes.
In this paper, we present an approach for analyzing the behavior of editors in the large current awareness service "NEP: New Economics Papers". We processed data from more than 38,000 issues derived from 90 different NEP reports over the past ten years. The aim of our analysis was to gain an inside to the editor behaviour when creating an issue and to look for factors that influence the success of a report. In our study we looked at the following features: average editing time, the average number of papers in an issue and the editor effort measured on presorted issues as relative search length (RSL). We found an average issue size of 12.4 documents per issue. The average editing time is rather low with 14.5 minute. We get to the point that the success of a report is mainly driven by its topic and the number of subscribers, as well as proactive action by the editor to promote the report in her community.