Skip to Main Content

How to Use ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)

Search the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature

The ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature is a freely-available, searchable database of citations to published works and grey literature. Each citation has two-way links: out to the publication and into ICPSR’s study catalog, so you can access the data being analyzed in the publications. The database currently contains 102,872 citations.

With the ICPSR Bibliography, one can:

  • Identify much of the research that has already been undertaken in an area
  • Replicate analyses of data
  • Avoid duplicating analysis that has already been done
  • Identify cross-disciplinary implications and uses of the data
  • Learn more about methodological issues, some of which are covered solely in the published literature
  • Find reports and other publications containing summarized statistics for use in publications like newspapers or grant applications.

The ICPSR Bibliography is also valuable for studying data as intellectual output. It allows investigators to:

  • Study how data resources are used
  • Conduct citations analyses
  • Investigate the life cycle of data

Librarian