Using the ICPSR Bibliography

The ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature is a freely-available, searchable database of citations to published works and grey literature. Each citation has two-way links: out to the publication and into ICPSR’s study catalog, so you can access the data being analyzed in the publications. 

The Bibliography facilitates data discovery and literature searches by social scientists, students, librarians, journalists, policymakers, and funding agencies.

User stories provide examples of how people use the ICPSR Bibliography to find shared data or publications of interest.

Librarians and other instructors can teach with the instructional module, Data Discovery with the ICPSR Bibliography. It helps you guide students to create a user story, then conduct an active tour of the Bibliography search tool, and concludes with a self assessment. 

With the ICPSR Bibliography, one can:

• Identify much of the research that has already been undertaken in an area
• Replicate analyses of data
• Avoid duplicating analysis that has already been done
• Identify cross-disciplinary implications and uses of the data
• Learn more about methodological issues, some of which are covered solely in the published literature
• Find reports and other publications containing summarized statistics for use in publications like newspapers or grant applications.

The ICPSR Bibliography is also valuable for studying data as intellectual output. It allows investigators to:

• Study how data resources are used
• Conduct citations analyses
• Investigate the life cycle of data

Watch this webinar from the 2020 ICPSR Data Fair. It contains a demonstration of the functionality and potential uses of the Bibliography, as well as a discussion of how to cite ICPSR studies, and the types of informal data citation currently used by authors publishing in the social science literature.