Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP)

We are very pleased to announce the 2019 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 2015 issues of current journals with three year embargoes, and 2013 issues of journals with five year embargoes.

New Articles

This year, we have added the German language Luzifer-Amor: Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse (LU-AM).  Luzifer-Amor is a German-language journal focused on the history of psychoanalysis,  which currently includes 31 volumes from 1988-2018.   


Improvements and New Features

We’ve continued to work 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, last year we introduced a “Related” reference link.  The related reference link takes the user directly to a potentially related article, based on our automatic (heuristic) analysis of the reference.  This method gives readers a means to find a related article, but it may not be accurate, since the information in a bibliographic reference is limited and not always representative of the content of an article.  We’ve not only continued to refine the algorithms for the matching, but we’ve also done (and continue to do) manual checks on the links.

Last year we added the Original Article Downloads (PDF) feature.  As we mentioned, collecting 147 years of articles is no small task, and we have made significant additional progress in process of back-filling the library.  It can be difficult to get the originals in some cases…but we continue to work on this.  We keep adding to it over the course of the year, and expect to have nearly 80% of the originals in place by the end of this year.

Finally, last year we introduced the first version of PEP-Easy (website no longer available), our web app for accessing PEP-Web from mobile devices.  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.  We’ve just come out with a minor upgrade to the app which broadens its use for users with institutional logins, supporting Federation Login, e.g., via OpenAthens.   And PEP-Easy now supports secure HTTP, via the URL (website no longer available). 

A Library of Premier Journals, Classic Books, and Videos

PEP-Web has over one million pages of online journals!  This new 2019 release of PEP-Web contains the complete text and illustrations of 74 premier journals in psychoanalysis, 100 classic psychoanalytic books, and the full text and Editorial notes of the 24 volumes of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud as well as the 19 volume German Freud Standard Edition Gesammelte Werke. It spans over 148 publication years and contains the full text of articles whose source ranges from 1871 through 2019. There are over 119 thousand articles and over 17.5 thousand figures and illustrations that originally resided on 2396 volumes with over 1 million printed pages. In hard copy, the PEP Archive represents a stack of paper more than 352 feet high and weighing over 4 tons!