“Wealth from the Sea”-- Finding Treasures in a Database of Social Science Data-Linked Literature

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a social and behavioral research data archive, maintains the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Initially created with the support of a National Science Foundation grant in 1999, the Bibliography captures and documents the usage of ICPSR data in research and publications. It helps people discover data and gauge its potential utility. Now housing over 110,000 data-linked citations, the Bibliography’s database continues to be expanded by librarians and information professionals who actively fish through research output, both published and unpublished, to find instances of ICPSR data usage. If a publication meets the Bibliography’s collection criteria, the publication is displayed with the research study’s record on ICPSR’s websites. By equipping people with a compass to discover and evaluate the value of the thousands of social science datasets held by ICPSR, the Bibliography provides “wealth from the sea” of data.

Attendees will enjoy engaging narratives and visual presentations that include insights about the ICPSR collection as reflected in the data-related literature. Topics covered will include (1) a look at the variety of venues where that literature is published, (2) analyses of changing data citation conventions, (3) comparisons between peer-reviewed and gray literature, including the increasing use of preprints, and (4) tales of datasets that are used in tandem to support interdisciplinary research. Attendees will come away with an appreciation of how a curated collection of data-linked publications can act as a dataset, itself, providing data users with insight while navigating the vast waters of social science scholarship.