About this site

This is one of the world's leading economics education sites, with thousands of documents downloaded by human users each day.

We have signed up to the following statement of good practice, developed in conjunction with the rest of the Higher Education Academy:

1. Pages on our site will have a clear, consistent structure that lets you find and use the content no matter whether you are using a graphical, text-only, speech browser, mobile device or even reading the page on a printout. Although we cannot guarantee a site will work on all past, present and future browsers, we aim to be usable with all current browsers and operating systems.
2. Content on our site will have meaningful URLs and be bookmarkable. If we move or delete documents, the old URL will be redirected to a relevant part of the site.
3. Our site will not break the controls on your web browser.
4. Links will give you a reasonable idea of what will happen when you click on them, and warn you if it requires a large download or a helper application.
5. We will regularly check for and replace broken links. Content that isn't marked as archived or given a definite date will be regularly checked.
6. The document content of the site will be searchable in a way that supports multiple terms, phrases and combinations of terms. Search results will show you the location of each file and its relevance to your search terms.
7. We will not hold personal information about you without your expressed permission.
8. We will never show you a bare error message. If there is an error (e.g. incorrect password, mistyped link), you will be told what the problem is and what you can do next.
9. We will not make content difficult to read with superfluous music or animation or intrusive advertising.
10. When you use our site for a transaction, such as making a purchase or creating a personal account, it will be clear at which stage you are and what remains to be done.

We are constantly trying to keep this site to the above standard. If there is any way in which we are falling short, please contact the web site editor directly: m.l.poulter@bris.ac.uk

AI (LLMs)

This is a manually curated and written site. We do not use AI tools to generate or re-write content, and our instructions to authors say that they must only use AI for suggesting grammatical or stylistic improvements. We do discuss the significance of AI tools in education, and that means sometimes giving examples of machine output; when we do so, we clearly indicate the machine output and distinguish it from the work of human authors.

Since we're on the open web, our website content is harvested by some organisations that train LLMs (large language models). There is not yet an accepted standard to designate text on a web page as LLM-generated, but once such a standard exists we will mark up all machine-generated text on our site to stop it being harvested.

Cookies

If you are merely reading this site, our system does not set cookies (small pieces of text on your computer which can be used to track you). However, we use Google Analytics, and as a result Google will set some cookies on your computer unless you opt out. If you want to opt out of being tracked by Google, you can do so by following these instructions.

If you visit a page with an embedded video, the video provider (usually YouTube) may set cookies on your computer.

If you log in to one of our site's password-restricted services, our site will set a cookie on your computer to give you access so you don't have to enter the password each time you use the service. This cookie does not contain any more information about you than is needed to log in. Separate data protection statements appear on sign-up forms for those services.

Web site statistics

This is a very popular site. We used to have a counter at the foot of each page that incremented each time it was viewed, showing a running total of views for each article. In 2023 we upgraded our software and the new version uses caching to quickly and efficiently send out each page. Unfortunately that means that a lot of views are not tracked in the database. We have not been able to get an accurate view count with our software, but one might come up with future updates.

We are aware that our contributors need to know how much their work has been read, for example to measure the impact of their pedagogical research. We use Google Analytics to track use of the site, and those metrics are available in a private interface. If you contact me directly ( m.l.poulter at bristol.ac.uk ) I can give you view statistics for any page or set of pages you are interested in. This only applies to sites published by the Economics Network; it excludes the IREE journal which has its own metrics.