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Data and Code Guidance by Data Editors

Guidance for authors wishing to create data and code supplements, and for replicators.

Suggested Information for Data and Code Hosting

On this page:

Trusted Repositories

Journals and institutions have assessed a number of trusted repositories:

List of Additional Acceptable Trusted Repositories in Economics

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.

Permanent Identifiers: Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) et al

A sufficient, but not necessary criterion for a “trusted repository” is the assignment of permanent identifiers, such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR30261.v6

Some repositories (often university-based) ones will also assign handles:

https://hdl.handle.net/1813/45789

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.

NOT ACCEPTABLE

A variety of (unfortunately) commonly used web-accessible locations are not acceptable as data repositories for the purpose of an article’s supplementary materials:

Some good examples

“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)

Challenges in Hosting of Data and Code at Restricted-Access Data Centers

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:

A few guidelines

Self-generated repositories (second best)

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

Some examples