EconBiz is a portal for scientific workers, researchers and lecturers in economics and related fields. It was established in Germany in 2002 and designed as a first choice when browsing various information in the aforementioned fields. The portal provides direct access to full texts. It is supplemented on a daily basis and contains more than a million of articles, books, doctoral dissertations, expert papers, course books and events.
EconBiz portal was established by the German Research Foundation (DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) as a Virtual library for economics and business studies. Today, it has become a global research engine that has been developed by the German National Library for Economics (ZBW – Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften) with the support of the Advisory Board and a broad partner network consisting of leading economic institutions, economic faculties or libraries from more than 30 countries worldwide.
The German National Library for Economics, founded in 1919, is one of the three biggest specialist libraries in Germany. It is one of the world’s largest research infrastructure for economic literature as it holds around 4,8 million books and other publications and is currently subscribed to 26, 000 journal titles. The German National Library for Economics has been developing an array of strategies and operational measures to preserve its digital content and conduct research in economics. This library has developed one of the most comprehensive thesauri of economic terms for indexing data in economics. Additionally, the library integrates various metadata for the needs of the EconBiz portal.
EconBiz offers search of the most renowned databases in the field of economics and related fields, and ECONIS, RePEc and EconStor are among them. In the very process of searching one can use different filters and sorting options in order to render results according to the topic, year, language and document type. The so-called EconBizz Apps such as apps for iPad, iPhone and Android have also been developed and they offer fast and easy overview of several databases simultaneously, direct access to PDF documents, access to free and licensed materials depending on the user’s location and basic information about the location of the closest library, its working hours, contact and the like. EconBiz portal can also be accessed via Facebook so everyone can choose the easiest way to access the data.
The University Library “Svetozar Markovic” joined this grouping in 2014, thereby providing access to electronic materials from all aforementioned fields to all interested users via an integrated search engine on its website. As part of this partnership, on EconBiz portal the University Library “Svetozar Markovic” promotes all important events regarding economic topics (conferences, workshops, seminars, congresses) held and organized in Serbia, one of them being a popular competition for economics students which is available to Serbian students owing to the partnership.
