The International Monetary Fund (IMF) Publications web site provides a wealth of well‐researched free content, from country reports to policy analysis papers. The site serves as the gateway to almost everything the IMF publishes.
The layout of the page is simple and straightforward. Aside from the database search interface that dominates the centre of the page, there is a column of links on the right side that lead to other IMF publications and subsections of the larger IMF site. The database is the main component of the page. It boasts 8,513 documents that, in theory, date back as far as 1981. The documents in the database are divided into eight series. Occasional papers, Papers on policy analysis and assessment, Policy discussion papers, and Working papers are similar in scope to peer‐reviewed journal articles. They are characterized by a fairly tight focus on a single issue. These documents are aimed at specialists in economics and policy, and typically include strong bibliographies that would be useful for citation mining. Documents from the Economic Issues series are written with laypeople in mind and cover a variety of topics. The Pamphlets Series is also aimed at the non‐technical audience. Although they tend to be somewhat dense, they cover broader topics than any of the Papers series. Country reports usually focus on a single issue, or a narrow set of issues, within the economy of a specific country and tend to be more technical than documents in the Economic Issues series. Some of the reports are, or include, a Statistical appendix which provides economic indicators over a period of a few years. Statistical appendices are good sources of data and indicators, but probably not as helpful as the resources in on the data tab of the larger IMF site. World economic and financial surveys often take a global perspective and include trends and data on a number of issues. This class of documents includes the World economic outlook and Global financial stability reports. Of all of the document series, this category will be the most useful for the greatest percentage of users.
Users can browse by title, author, and subject. There are also dialogue boxes available for title, author/editor, and subject/keyword searches. The database is capable of simple Boolean searching using And and Or. The database does not support truncation, wildcards, or the use of Not as an operator. Limiters include series, language, and a variety of options for date of publication. While the search interface is fairly self‐explanatory, there is a conspicuous absence of any sort of documentation or help file. The search results pages are exactly what users have come to expect from a modern web site. Results can be sorted by date, author, or title. Each page displays up to twenty results, and each entry includes a title, series, published date, and a list of subject terms which seem to be descriptors assigned by the IMF. The database performs searches quite quickly, and PDF download times are relatively short.
One downside of the database is that there is no way to limit results to include only full‐text documents. There are a number of links along the right‐hand side of the page that allow users to browse only full‐text documents in various series by year, but finding documents by browsing can be time consuming. The addition of a native “search within these results” feature would greatly improve accessibility, but using the Find feature of the internet browser is an acceptable solution for sifting through large amounts of search returns. Full‐text coverage of documents from before the mid 1990s is not particularly strong. While earlier documents may not be available in full‐text, the database is still useful as a finding aid. Almost all of the full‐text documents are available as PDFs. Many of the older documents were certainly scanned, and although a few of the examples examined while researching this review were a somewhat off‐centre, they were still readable.
Be sure to alert patrons to the site's email notification system which sends alerts when new documents matching user‐defined criteria are published. Users can create a profile at no charge and select from a wide range of countries and topics of interest. The link to the notification system can be elusive; it appears, seemingly at random, on some results pages but not others. The easiest way to locate it is through the site index.
All‐in‐all, the IMF Publications web site is an excellent resource, but only for a relatively small population of users. IMF publications are not exactly light reading, so the appeal for patrons other than students and researchers of economics and political science is rather limited. Public, school, and most special librarians should take note of the existence of the site in case a truly in‐depth question comes along, but should not feel the need to publicize it to their patrons. Academic libraries that serve departments of economics or political science should definitely consider adding this site to their lists of recommended resources. The bottom line is that the site is free, and any criticism of it should be evaluated with this key fact in mind. It costs nothing to add the IMF Publications web site to an existing list of recommended resources, and it provides full‐text coverage of many documents that would otherwise have to be purchased by the library.
