A question about citation

1

I have what is perhaps a rather basic question about how to cite IPUMS data. I fully understand the instructions provided here Cite us! Seriously though… – Use It for Good .

My question rather concerns how to cite specific datasets. For example, let’s say that I make use of data from the 2018 American Community Survey: 5-Year Data (NHGIS code: 2014_2018_ACS5a) in a paper, specifically data from Table 1, which has the following characteristics:

“Aggregate Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2018 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars)
Universe: Population 15 years and over
Source code: B19313
NHGIS code: AJ0O”

In addition to citing the authors of the dataset somewhere in the paper (in this case Manson et al. 2019), what would be the best way to refer to this specific dataset and table? My question, that is, concerns how to properly reference specific tables or datasets (to provide the reader with more detailed info, that is).

Should I, for example, simply refer to “IPUMS” as the author, or should it rather be the U.S. Census Bureau? If anyone has any advice on this, or an example of a paper/text where you have included references to specific IPUMS tables/datasets, I would really appreciate if you could share them.

Thanks in advance.

2

At this time, there is no formal policy for this specific situation. However, I think it is appropriate to clearly note that the original source of these data is the Census Bureau, and that you used a version of the data available through IPUMS NHGIS. My suggestion would be including language on this in a data and methods section of your paper and citing the specific tables there. I am linking examples of papers that do this nicely with the IPUMS Health Surveys data for reference (Peele, 2019; Hsieh & Lui, 2019; Schnittker & Do 2019).

3

Great, thanks!

1 Like