Share & Manage Data: Introduction & Overview
Why Should Data Be Shared?
You’ve just spent the last several years collecting amazing data and now people are telling you to share those data. What does that mean? Why is data sharing so important? This page provides basic information about the role of sharing data in the scientific process, and options for sharing. If you need information on data management and data sharing plans, please see Data Management Plans & Grant Support.
How is sharing data critical to the advancement of science?
- Sharing data maximizes the value of investments in data collection.
- Sharing data demonstrates good stewardship of the time and goodwill offered by individuals participating in your study.
- Sharing data provides opportunities for testing theories and using novel methods to solve problems.
- Sharing data allows for replication and extension of your results.
Sharing data should be a thoughtful decision, taking into consideration data confidentiality and privacy for research participants, promises made in your informed consent documents, your funder’s requirements for data sharing, and the ability for you to demonstrate the impact of your work. For more information see our page on depositing data.
How to Share
The best way to share is to deposit your data with a recognized repository where it will be made available and its use supported. Things to consider when choosing a repository:
- Are there requirements from a project funder, journal editor, your university, or others to share in a specific place?
- Where will people look for data like yours?
- Does the repository accept and disseminate both public- and restricted-use data (if applicable)?
- Will your data be well documented and easily found using the search tools on the site?
- Does the repository preserve the data and migrate it as technology changes, so it will be usable for the foreseeable future?
If you have data related to social and behavioral sciences, ICPSR could be the perfect home! Here’s why:
- ICPSR is a trusted repository with over 60 years of leadership in data sharing and preservation.
- You can publish the data instantly or opt for professional curation to ensure long-term use.
- The large catalog with robust search tools attracts researchers from around the world.
- Detailed documentation helps secondary analysts understand how the data were collected, by and from whom, and when so they can evaluate the usefulness of the data for their project.
- Rigorous disclosure risk review procedures and an application process for restricted data protect respondent confidentiality.
- ICPSR tracks the impact of data sharing with metrics on downloads and related publications.
- ICPSR provides a suggested citation.
- A professional team is ready to assist you in making your data available!
Data can be anything that is used as the foundation of research. Specifically, it might be answers to survey questions, text from speeches or articles, or observations from a given setting or types of interaction. ICPSR shares “raw data” for individuals to analyze, rather than the tables or other summarizations of data resulting from the analyses.
ICPSR specializes in quantitative data, such as data from surveys and administrative records, but ICPSR’s data holdings represent all of the innovations in research using naturally occurring, qualitative, mixed-method data, image and video data, social media data, and more. ICPSR data cover a wide range of subjects, including people of all ages; institutions like schools, colleges, police departments, hospitals, libraries, and art museums; as well as artifacts such as speeches, newspaper articles, and social media posts. The data span a study of public executions in 1194-1294 to present-day studies. Topics include measures of attitudes on politics and key issues over time; behaviors related to health, relationships, spending, and time use; and data on crime, victimization, education, and the arts. ICPSR actively seeks studies with nationally representative samples and those focusing on understudied populations based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or people experiencing things like teen pregnancy or drug abuse. Longitudinal and repeated cross-section data are especially valued. See the Collection Development Policy for more information about the types of data ICPSR prioritizes.
ICPSR is the archive of record for major research funders (link to ICPSR funders).
Once you’ve chosen to share your data through ICPSR, you have two options: Self-publish your data and documentation or have ICPSR professionally curate your data. If you choose the second option, your data will undergo the following:
- A review to identify respondent confidentiality risks, such as direct or indirect identifiers, and a recommendation about whether the data should be publicly available or restricted-use.
- The creation of a complete metadata record that documents your study’s purpose, methods, sample, and other key details. This will make your data discoverable through ICPSR’s search tools and usable by others not on your research team.
- A comparison of the data with the documentation to ensure codes are correct, variables are properly formatted, missing values are defined, and labels are clear.
- The creation of files formatted for the major statistical packages (R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata) and a delimited file as well as an archival file (ASCII) and online analysis tools (if desired) and production of a standardized codebook.
- Identification of published and unpublished works based on your data and publication links added to the study.
- Release into ICPSR’s catalog and archival storage.
Note: You retain the ownership rights to your data; ICPSR shares on your behalf.
Suppose your data include sensitive questions or contextual details that are analytically important but might increase the chance that a participant could be reidentified. In that case, ICPSR will recommend releasing a restricted-use version of the data. Researchers must apply to use restricted data (learn more about Restricted-use Data Management at ICPSR). Applications require a description of the project and must be supported by a restricted-data-use agreement signed by a representative from the researcher’s institution as well as evidence of IRB approval or exemption.
If you are planning to do additional data collection or wish to link your data to other sources, ICPSR can keep your list of participants’ contact information on a secure server unconnected to the internet.