Bibliography Reference Types & Short Explanation of Search Methodology

Updated June 7, 2021

Bibliography Reference Types

There are 11 reference types available in the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Each is described below, in alphabetical order:

  1. A/V Materials were originally considered to be videos, but can include PowerPoint slides and podcasts.
  2. Books are authored or edited by one or more people or entities, generally containing multiple chapters, and 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. 
  3. 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. 
  4. Conference Proceedings encompass both conference abstracts and full papers, as well as posters. Some of them have extended abstracts or the whole conference paper uploaded. The category should really be called “Conference presentations,” as we tend to place proceedings that are published in journals in the "Journal article" category.
  5. Documents are mostly found online, self-published on authors' websites, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, or university websites. Documents have less publication information, are mostly in PDF or Word format, and are not formatted for official publishing. Oftentimes, they are working papers that are not the final versions of the paper and will eventually be published as conference papers or journal articles. One subset of this category is a job market paper: a chapter of--mostly Economics-- dissertations which does not qualify as a dissertation, since it is only part of the latter and is an evolving document. Also, until we have a separate category for preprints, they are treated as Documents, even if they already have a unique identifier, like a DOI.
  6. Electronic Sources are published on websites as mostly blogs, but they are not necessarily text-only, e.g., they can be infographics. 
  7. 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.
  8. Magazine Articles are included if the content is considered to be scholarly and meets other collection criteria. 
  9. Newspaper Articles from reputable publications are added when their content is considered to meet our collection criteria.
  10. Reports are published papers which were not published in journals. They are either published by a government entity, research center, or non-profit, and the like, mostly as part of a series of reports or working papers, although there are some individual reports that fall into this category. They have complete publishing information (title of report series, date, No., publisher).
  11. Theses cover dissertations, theses, and capstone projects (mostly in the form of posters) for MA/MS- or PhD-level work. Theses are published online, by default, since we rarely access them via print only. Undergraduate honors theses or posters are not collected.

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