Research Spotlights: Introducing a tool for showcasing the visibility of diverse populations in scholarly publications

The ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature is a freely-available and continually updated database of over 105,000 citations that link data to primary and secondary analyses by researchers across the world. Since 2020, the Bibliography’s Information Resource staff has been creating instructional resources called Research Spotlights, using the Bibliography as their source to synthesize the findings about one or several related topics. These Research Spotlights show how scholars are using data available from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in their analyses.

This poster will showcase how we make use of Research Spotlights to highlight the diversity of populations represented across a variety of fields contained in the studies archived at ICPSR. In addition to shedding light on research publications using data connected to timely topics, the Research Spotlights written so far have been able to underscore how research findings are particularly relevant to specialized diverse communities, such as LGBTQ+ populations, women, or the elderly.

The future goal for the Research Spotlights is to adopt better analytics to track their impact on data reuse. These short literature reviews increase awareness of the value of existing data to address new research questions. Data reuse is cost- and time-efficient, and it benefits users in many areas of social science including training and higher education. Librarians and other instructors can utilize Research Spotlights as data literacy tools to help students and emerging scholars find models for data reuse in the scholarly literature.