Bibliography Reference Types & Short Explanation of Search Methodology

Updated January 30, 2025

Bibliography Reference Types

ICPSR study data are found to be used in a variety of types of peer reviewed and grey literature. There are 12 reference types represented in the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Each is described below:

  1. Journal Articles most often come from peer-reviewed journals, and each journal title is collected in an authority list, to enable consistency when browsing titles on the ICPSR websites.
  2. Preprints are author-submitted manuscripts that have reached the final stage before undergoing peer review. They are made publicly available on preprint servers. In the Bibliography, a manuscript is categorized as a preprint if:
    • It is explicitly identified as a preprint and has a registered digital object identifier (DOI); or
    • It is available on an official preprint server and has been assigned a DOI.

    Having a registered DOI distinguishes a preprint from other manuscripts, indicating the preprint is now part of the scholarly record. If a manuscript lacks a DOI, it is treated as a Document (see below).

  3. Books are authored or edited by one or more people or entities, generally contain multiple chapters, and are distributed by a publisher, either in print or via e-book, or both. If the editor is the author of all of the book’s content, the editor appears as the author. If the book is part of a series, the series name is provided, when possible. 
  4. Book Sections are generally considered chapters in books, authored either by the book’s editor or more often, by other people. If the book section is part of a book that is in a series, the series name is provided, when possible. 
  5. Reports are published works that are not Journal Articles. They are typically issued by government entities, research centers, non-profits, or similar organizations. Reports are often part of a series (e.g., working papers, technical reports) but may also be standalone publications. They include complete publishing information, such as the report series title, publication date, report number, and publisher details. 
  6. Theses include dissertations, theses, and capstone projects (mostly in the form of posters) for masters or PhD-level work. Undergraduate honors theses or posters are not collected.
  7. Conference Presentations include both conference abstracts and full papers, as well as posters. Conference proceedings that are published in journals are usually collected as Journal Articles.
  8. Newspaper Articles from reputable publications are added when their content is considered to meet the Bibliography’s collection criteria.
  9. Magazine Articles are included if the content is considered to be scholarly and meets the Bibliography’s collection criteria. 
  10. Electronic Sources are published on websites and are mostly blogs, but they are not necessarily text-only, e.g., they can be infographics. 
  11. A/V Materials were originally considered to be videos, but can include digital slide presentations and podcasts.
  12. Documents are materials typically found online and self-published on authors' websites, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, or university websites. They are characterized by having less formal publication information, are usually in PDF or Word format, and are not formatted for a specific publisher. Documents are often working papers that are not part of a series, or drafts that are not final versions. A subset includes job market papers, which are chapters of dissertations—mainly in Economics—that do not qualify as dissertations themselves. Unlike Preprints, Documents are not hosted on official preprint servers and lack persistent identifiers, such as DOIs.

Short Explanation of Search Methodology

Finding and Capturing Data Use Remains a Manual Process

If all authors included formal data citations with machine-readable, persistent identifiers in their scholarly publications, ICPSR could take advantage of indexing scripts to find a near-complete list of primary and secondary-use publications. But limiting our collection of related publications to only those in which ICPSR study DOIs were used would mean all data use that was not cited properly would go unlinked and uncounted. Instead we find ICPSR data-related literature in several ways:

  1. PIs/Depositors can provide a list of related publications that ICPSR Curators send to the ICPSR Bibliography staff, who add the citations to the Bibliography’s database after checking to make sure each publication meets our collection criteria and the citation information is accurate. 
  2. Data downloaders sometimesfollow the terms of use requiring them to make ICPSR aware of any of their publications that analyze the data they accessed. They can email citations directly to the Bibliography, or they can use the form we provide, letting us know which study numbers to associate with their publication. 
  3. Restricted data users are required to submit annual reports that include a list of their publications and presentations that were based on the data they received from ICPSR. Those annual reports get forwarded to the ICPSR Bibliography staff, who verify and enter the citations into the Bibliography’s database. 
  4. ICPSR Curation staff may encounter primary or secondary works when curating a study. They send the citations to the ICPSR Bibliography staff, who verify and add the citations to the Bibliography’s database.
  5. ICPSR Bibliography staff find the vast majority of the works that are in the ICPSR Bibliography. They do so by detecting data use in the literature--verifying both explicitly cited data use as well as informal and incomplete references. We create queries, and set up email alerts, in electronic social science literature databases, e.g., ProQuest, PubMed, Scopus/ScienceDirect, ProQuest, EBSCOhost, and more. For the most part, we collect publications only when they analyze the data. (See Figure 1, which shows a heuristic we use for determining data use within a publication.)

Figure 1: Heuristic for examining documents for data use