With a new year comes resolutions to become better versions of ourselves. Perhaps you have resolved to be more organized, appreciate the little things, or just reaffirm your commitment to using data for good-never for evil. Dream big because IPUMS wants to help you achieve your goals (unless you have again promised yourself that you will floss daily)!
We recently resolved to outperform Google*. An ambitious team, led by Erin Meyer, set out to close the gap between citation counts in the IPUMS bibliography and Google Scholar. They scoured the internet to uncover your incredible research accomplishments that use IPUMS data. And oh did they find research!
Figure 1 shows the citations at the beginning of the project in blue; the red area shows the additional citations added by our gumshoes on the case. Compare these to the yellow line (Google Scholar results) and laud our achievement!
Are you impressed yet…are you wishing you had been part of this dream team…do you want to claim a part of this amazing victory?
While we have gotten quite good and tracking down fascinating #poweredbyIPUMS research…if you enter the information yourself, we can move on to tackle even bigger challenges (perhaps at this time next year IPUMS will be able to help you achieve your dental hygiene goals).
So stop procrastinating and enter your research that uses IPUMS directly in the IPUMS Bibliography. If we were the enabling types, we would provide you with a list of resolutions that you might consider accomplished by doing this**.
When you navigate to the bibliography site, you can click “add a publication.” First, we will ask you to give us the general information about your publication.
Please note the many types of research we include in our bibliography; under “Type,” you can choose from a whole list of options. Tell us about your book, journal article, section or chapter of a book, dissertation or thesis, conference paper, working paper, newspaper article, or some other miscellaneous publication (maybe your job market paper!).
Then, you have the opportunity to tell us which IPUMS data project you used. When you do this, the IPUMS team that works on that dataset does a little celebratory dance because your work highlights their darling data!
Next, you can select all the topics relevant to your research. This also helps other people find and read and cite your amazing research.
Finally, there is a space to include the text of your abstract. As with the entire bibliography, this makes it easy for the folks at IPUMS HQ and all IPUMS users see how the data are being used.
Then, you click “submit” and that is it! You are done adding your citation to the IPUMS bibliography, and possibly accomplishing your New Year’s resolution. Bask in the glory of crossing this off the list and think of all the other things you can tackle with this forward momentum!
We wish you speedy download times of your customized IPUMS data sets, no comments from reviewer two, and the 1890 Census microdata in the new year!
*In the slightly niche aspect of counting IPUMS publications
**being a good friend, giving back, contributing to the public good, getting organized, promoting your own research, becoming an internet celebrity, etc.
Story by Emily Johnson and Kari Williams
IPUMS Data Analyst and Senior Data Analyst, respectively
