Guidance for authors wishing to create data and code supplements, and for replicators.
Journals and institutions have assessed a number of trusted repositories:
A list of trusted repositories that have been found to be acceptable for the purpose of archiving social and economic data can be found here:
https://social-science-data-editors.github.io/reference/TrustedRepositories.html
The list is maintained by the editors collaborating on this site. To suggest an addition, please issue a pull request, or email one of the editors.
A sufficient, but not necessary criterion for a “trusted repository” is the assignment of permanent identifiers, such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).
Some repositories (often university-based) ones will also assign handles:
Others assign DOI upon demand. We generally suggest requesting a DOI if possible. Examples:
However, care must be taken when using permanent identifiers: the URL in the address bar is (almost) never the same as the DOI or handle. All permanent identifiers are redirects: they constitute a permanent entry that points to wherever the most recent version of the object can be found:
Only the first entry in each of the examples above should be used for citing, not the second.
A variety of (unfortunately) commonly used web-accessible locations are not acceptable as data repositories for the purpose of an article’s supplementary materials:
“Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion, Replication files and raw data” (Michael Clemens)
- Hosted on Harvard Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/bracero
- Contains two datasets:
- Clemens, Michael, 2017, “Raw scanned PDFs of primary sources for workers, wages, and crops”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DJHVHB, Harvard Dataverse, V1
- Clemens, Michael, 2018, “Replication Data for: Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/17M4ZP, Harvard Dataverse, V1
“United States Newspaper Panel, 1869-2004” (Gentzkow, Shapiro, Sinkinson)
- Hosted on ICPSR at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/30261
- Contains
- Gentzkow, Matthew, Shapiro, Jesse M., and Sinkinson, Michael. United States Newspaper Panel, 1869-2004. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2014-12-10. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR30261.v6
“Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset for India (SHRUG)” (Asher and Novosad)
- Hosted on Harvard Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DPESAK
- Contains:
- Asher, Sam; Novosad, Paul, 2019, “Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset for India (SHRUG)”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DPESAK, Harvard Dataverse, V1, UNF:6:Upe25NYAZwR+6VsDt5X2lQ==
Users of restricted-access data centers (RADC, such as FSRDCs, CASD, etc.) face certain challenges in the handling of data and code as described in this document:
If a RADC has at least an archival or backup policy of sufficient length (e.g., 10 or more years), but does not offer a formal repository, then the following procedure allows users to find and request code and data
DOI
DOI
will be assigned, e.g., 10.5281/zenodo.NNNNN
.openicpsr-NNNNN
. The DOI
is derived from the project number as 10.3886/ENNNNN
V1.DOI
./some/path/project/10.5281/zenodo.NNNNN/:
data/original/rawdata.dta
data/derived/analysis.dta
programs/01_cleaning.do
programs/02_analysis.do