Ernad is the software system that powers NEP: New Economics Papers and bims. Both services are ernad implementations.

Any running implementation combines a chronological array of issues of new documents with a set of thematic reports that selectors maintain from these issues.

The name ernad stands for editing reports on new academic documents. Roman D. Shapiro wrote the first version in 2004. He was paid by funds left-over from the JISC-funded WoPEc project. Since 2004, Thomas Krichel has maintained ernad. Today, none of the original code of Roman’s is in use.

Today, ernad is divided into an implementation-independent set of code written in Perl and Python, and implementation-dependent templating code written in XSLT. Ernad supports

• a web interface that allows users to select and filter documents for their collections, as well as to sort documents
• an elaborate template set for production of a web interface and well as html and text emails
• a set of machine-learning modules to presort report issues

Ernad depends on

• the Apache web server’s mod_fcgid
• Libxml2 and libxslt
• LibSVM
• Perl