I’ve been struggling for several days to understand why some of my codes produce substantially different results from IPUMS ASEC data after I downloaded an expanded extract.
It turns out that the reason are the edits that were made on September 5 (2025) to the NIU codes of several variables, according to the revision history:
- The variables INCEDUC, OINCBUS, INCRETI1 and INCRETI2 were widened to accommodate NIU codes. Previously, the maximum top value and NIU codes were the same. In each of these variables, no cases in the data contained the max value, so the only change in these variables is to the NIU values (which are now 1 digit wider).
Is there an email distribution list that notifies users of these variable edits? Or is there any other way to be actively notified about them?
IPUMS sends email newsletters to registered users such as yourself that include news about data releases and summaries of updates or improvements to the data. These newsletters are a good source to watch for data revisions, but they don’t include as much detail as the revision history pages of the data collections. And they don’t come out immediately after a new data release or a change to the data (our September newsletter has not come out yet).
As of now we do not have any tools that send more immediate notifications to users about data releases or updates. If you hope to know very quickly after any changes are made, my best suggestion would be to write a short script that emails you any time the revision history page of a data collection you use changes.
When we uncover a significant error in our data, we do contact affected users directly in addition to posting an alert to the revision history. We do not directly contact users when we find and fix smaller errors such as the one you mentioned.
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Thanks @Isabel_Pastoor for answering my question!