The http://www.nber.org/wp_metadata" directory has commonly requested meta-data for the NBER working paper series in various delimited UTF-8 or Stata .dta formats suitable for analysis by statistical or general purpose software. It can also load into spreadsheets with a single click. These files are intended for statistical analysis. Several formats for bibliographic software are linked from http://www.nber.org/policies.html

Available formats

All of these files should update automatically each week.

For the character files the first column is always the working paper number, then a tab, then the listed variable(s). The first row has variable names. Subordinate tables, like working_papers_authors or working_papers_jels, have multiple rows per paper, often organized by an order_num field. So the row in working_papers_authors with order_num = 0 is the first author, order_num = 1 is the second author, etc.

These files have one observation per paper, or one observation for each paper-author combination, paper-program or paper-jel combination. File names and content for the tab delimited versions:
abs.tsv abstract
date.tsv issue date
jel.tsv JEL codes
prog.tsv NBER program names
proj.tsv NBER project names
auth.tsv author name
auths.tsv authors, (paper, authors) (comma delimited for multiple authors)
title.tsv Titles
published.tsv Book or Journal Publication information

There is also ref.tsv which combines paper number, author, title and issue date in a single line like a journal reference. In this file the author's names for each paper are concatenated into a single string. Variable names by file:
abs.tsv: paper,abstract
author_user.tsv:paper,author_user
auths.tsv: paper,name
date.tsv: paper,issue_date
jel.tsv: paper,jel
prog.tsv: paper,program
proj.tsv: paper,project
project.tsv: paper,project
published.tsv: paper,published_text
title.tsv: paper,title
ref.tsv: paper,author,title,issue_date,doi

Clicking on the file name in the tsv subdirectory here will open the file in a spreadsheet, for most users. Stata versions are in ./dta. Here is an example of a Stata program that prepares a bibliography of all papers in the Health Economics program:

Sample Stata program to list all papers in the HE program

use using "http://www.nber.org/wp_metadata/dta/ref.dta" keep paper author title save ref,replace clear use using "http://www.nber.org/wp_metadata/dta/prog.dta" keep if program=="EH" merge 1:1 paper using ref list in 1/3

Working paper numbers have 4 or 5 digits and usually begin with a "w". However, in years past the prefix letter could be an "h" (for historical) or a "t" (for technical)

The published.tsv file shows where working papers were eventually published. It is not comprehensive. It combines information from authors, Crossref, RePEc and online vitae and journal names may vary by source.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg@nber.org
+1 617-682-6204