Data Services

Cite us! Seriously though…

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By Renae Rodgers and Kari Williams

Hi there IPUMS users! Let’s talk about citations. When using our datasets in your insightful, groundbreaking, interesting work, please cite us! 

Seriously though. 

Cite us. 

You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t rob a little old lady of her handbag, you wouldn’t base work on that of a colleague and not put their paper(s) in your reference section, right?!? Then don’t use IPUMS data and fail to mention it! 

To help you on your way, here are some answers to frequently asked questions:

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In the Archive: “25 Years of IPUMS Data”

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“25 Years of IPUMS Data,” the current IPUMS/MPC archive exhibit, highlights a dynamic quarter center history of data innovation at the University of Minnesota. In the late 1980s, the Social History Research Laboratory at the University of Minnesota’s History Department proposed “the creation of a single integrated microdata series composed of public use samples for every year … with the exception of the 1890 census, which was destroyed by fire.”  The primary aim was to make the U.S. census microdata “as compatible over time as possible while losing little, if any, of the detail in the original datasets” (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: A Prospectus).

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New Feature: Terra Populus Launches TerraScope

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A boy at a farm in Cambodia. Photo: USAID HARVEST Program

TerraPop recently launched TerraScope, a map-based portal for exploring the data in the TerraPop collection. The TerraPop collection includes census data from over 160 countries around the world, as well as environmental data describing land cover, land use, and climate. With such a broad range of data available, selecting a study area for which data are available to study a particular question or, conversely, determining the types of research questions that can be studied within an area of interest can be challenging.

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