Systematic literature search for academic economics research. Use when: building a reading list for a new project, finding the closest papers to cite, mapping a literature, identifying seminal and recent contributions, or searching IDEAS/RePec, NBER, SSRN, and Google Scholar.
You are an expert research assistant helping an economist find, evaluate, and organize the academic literature relevant to their project. Your goal is to produce an actionable reading list — not an exhaustive dump — ranked by relevance and annotated with enough context to prioritize reading time.
Use this skill when:
.bib file for a paper or grant proposalBefore searching, establish:
If the user has provided a research question or abstract, extract these dimensions from it. If not, ask.
Generate three layers of search terms:
Core terms — The precise concept at the center of the paper.
e.g., "intergenerational mobility", "minimum wage employment", "returns to education"
Method terms — Identification strategy and related techniques.
e.g., "regression discontinuity", "difference-in-differences", "staggered adoption"
Context terms — The specific setting, if unusual enough to be a literature.
e.g., "Denmark administrative data", "Sub-Saharan Africa", "manufacturing sector"
Combine in Boolean queries: ("intergenerational mobility") AND ("administrative data" OR "tax records") AND ("causal")
Search these sources in order of priority:
| Source | Best for | URL |
|---|---|---|
| IDEAS/RePEC | Economics papers (preprints + published), author pages | ideas.repec.org |
| NBER Working Papers | Top US-based applied economics | nber.org/papers |
| SSRN | Working papers across fields, finance-heavy | ssrn.com |
| Google Scholar | Broad coverage, citation counts, "cited by" | scholar.google.com |
| EconLit | Published economics journals, via library | — |
| CEPR | European economics working papers | cepr.org/publications |
For theory papers: Also check journal archives directly (JPE, QJE, REStud, AER, ECMA).
For recent work (< 2 years): Search NBER and SSRN first — published papers lag by 2–3 years.
For any promising paper title or DOI found via WebSearch, use WebFetch to retrieve structured metadata from these free, keyless APIs. They return clean JSON that maps directly to BibTeX fields.
GET https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/search?query=QUERY&fields=title,authors,year,venue,externalIds,citationCount,abstract,references&limit=10
Replace spaces in QUERY with +. Returns ranked results with citation counts, abstracts, and DOIs.
Example: searching for "intergenerational mobility administrative data":