Social Science Research Network

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a website devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities. SSRN is viewed as particularly strong in the fields of economics, finance, accounting, management, and law. SSRN was founded in 1994 by Michael Jensen (a financial economist) and Wayne Marr. Jensen continues to serve as chairman of the company. Gregg Gordon is SSRN's president and CEO.

SSRN Networks:

• Accounting
• Economics
• Financial Economics
• Health Economics
• Political Science

Academic papers can be uploaded directly to the site by authors as PDF documents. All author-uploaded papers are available for worldwide free downloading. Users can also subscribe to abstracting e-mail journals covering a broad range of subject matters. These eJournals then periodically distribute emails containing abstracts (with links to the full text where applicable) of papers recently submitted to SSRN in the respective field.

In economics, and to some degree in law (especially in the field of law and economics), almost all papers are now first published as preprints on SSRN and/or on other paper distribution networks such as RePEc before being submitted to an academic journal.

On SSRN, authors and papers are ranked by their number of downloads, which has become an informal indicator of popularity on prepress and open access sites.See Bernard S. Black and Paul Caron, "Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly...
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