Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP)

We are very pleased to announce the 2018 release of the PEP-Web Archive.  The annual release means that another year of the current publications move out of the publisher’s embargo period: subscribers now have access to the 2014 issues of current journals with three year embargoes, and 2012 issues of journals with five year embargoes.  With the addition of Revista de Psicoanálisis, a publication of the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (APA), Volumes 1-27 (1943 – 1970) in July, and the Chinese Annual of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, PEP-Web now has over One Million pages of online journals!

and of course we’ve been adding new videos to PEP-Web throughout the year–with a lot more to come.


Improvements and New Features

We’ve worked to improve the precision of our links from references to PEP-Web articles.  In previous releases, our matching algorithms used heuristics to try to match references to articles, in order to match as many as possible even when the information in the reference is inexact.  From user feedback about these links, we’ve now constrained the matching algorithm with a conservative bias towards more precise matches.  This should help researchers who use the “Who Cited This” feature at the end of each article, producing a more accurate citation list.  However, since it can be useful to find an article closely related to a reference which isn’t currently in the PEP-Web Archive, we’ve created a new “Related” reference link.  The related reference link takes the user directly to a potentially related article, based on heuristic analysis of the reference.  This method gives readers a means to find a related article, but it can be inaccurate, since the information in a bibliographic reference is limited and not always representative of the content of an article.  Our implementation of this feature is very new and we will continue to refine it as the year progresses.


This year we introduce two new important features for PEP:

Original Article Downloads (PDF)

Our PDF download feature has now been enhanced to give users a choice between the PEP-Web rekeyed version of an article, and the original article format from the journal, with all the original formatting.  You can choose which type of PDF you want on an article-by-article basis, just by clicking the PDF Download button, which now works as a pull-down menu, selecting one of the two formats.

Collecting 147 years of articles is no small task, and while we are still in the process of backfilling the library, it already contains over 90 thousand original PDFs!  The Original PDFs show the actual page layout and formatting of the original publication.  To provide the originals, we collected a mix (by the nature of the age and rarity of some journals) of scanner and print-based PDFs (where scanner based PDFs contain “pictures” of the pages rather than being “text-based”).

PEP-Web for mobile devices

Also coinciding with the 2018 is the official release of our web app, PEP-Easy.  

Providing an interface more suited to smaller devices than PEP-Web, it brings together most of your favorite PEP-Web features in an easy to use application which can outpace PEP-Web in presentation speed.  It allows you to easily read on your browser, as well as download articles in PDF and ePub format.  The web app interface also has an internationalization feature that can be configured to display in Spanish or French.

The application is designed to make it quicker and easier to find an article on PEP-Web using mobile devices. You can do simple author and title searches or search full text using more advanced terms like on PEP-Web.  You can search and read abstracts without logging in, and you can set your login as persistent to read or download the full-text (or PDFs and ePubs) of articles.

And as a web app, you are always using the latest version.  PEP-Easy can be accessed at (website no longer available) and it will run on smart phones, tablets, and other small mobile devices running a current version of a standard mobile browser.  It even runs in your desktop browser!