A Feasible Uniform Standard for Deep Citation of Social Science Data

这个政治学基础设施项目为社会科学数据源创建了一个统一的引用标准。 类似于引用文本来源的标准的影响，这促进了研究和研究人员之间的联系。 因此，它改进了科学进程，促进了知识的积累。 标准数据源引用的使用扩大了复制工作，并减轻了这些工作，提高了研究人员的生产力，并允许更多的资源用于新的研究。 随着科学家与其他科学家建立更多的联系，科学也在进步。 文本引用是如此频繁，以至于它们被认为是理所当然的，因为它们已经变得多么重要。 在过去的50年里，定量研究已经成为期刊发表内容的大约一半，我们没有可比的数据引用标准。 这个项目建立了一个简单但关键的基础设施，一个统一的标准，深入引用数据，提供了惊人的和显着的时间和资源的节省，并在研究生产力随之而来的收益，人们可能会得出结论，电子新闻和电子数据传播的爆炸性增长将解决引用和源数据之间的联系的问题。 知识流通的数量和速度肯定大幅增加，但由于缺乏引用数据的统一标准，问题正在加剧，而不是解决。 鉴于网址在网络上的平均持续时间很短，在线数据集的引用不断增加是一个问题，也可能是一个机会，但绝对不是答案。 很明显，今天打印出来的手稿中引用的在线来源可能是明天在网址上可用的同一来源，更不用说当手稿出版或在未来的某个日期。 对无法检索的来源的引用是无用的。文本的深度引用意味着一个文本来源可以明确地引用另一个来源或该来源的任何部分，其方式是该来源可以被另一个读者在几年或几十年后检索到。 对于书籍，作者、书名、出版商和页码足以检索任何引用的特定短语。 数据的深度引用意味着相同的，但涉及新的技术问题，这些问题在这个项目中得到解决。 读者需要能够检索相同版本的原始数据集，识别相同的变量，使用相同的编码，并且在某些情况下能够进行相同的分析。 为了促进这一进程，研究人员为社会科学出版制定了统一的引文标准，并为数据引文和源数据的电子链接创建了一个试验平台或原型工具。政治学作为一门学科，在社会科学基础设施建设方面一直处于历史前列，包括创建世界上最大的社会科学数据档案在这方面，主要的工作包括：编制第一套通用商业统计软件包（SPSS）;在虚拟数据中心进行数据传播。 每一次发展都起源于政治学内部，并极大地促进了政治学研究。 但每一个都代表了学科对科学研究基础设施的持续贡献，远远超出了学科自身的知识边界。 该项目将具有广泛的影响。调查人员在两个方面进行，首先是为引用的数据开发标准化的数字签名，其次是创建电子连接和从源数据检索数据的工具。 为了建立统一的数据引用标准，并为数据引用和来源的电子链接创建新的工具，研究人员利用哈佛-麻省理工学院数据中心已经在进行的数字图书馆工作来开发虚拟数据中心（VDC）。 该项目可以以较低的边际成本无缝扩展VDC平台，并为VDC系统作为永久公益物增加了大量价值。 在这个项目中，VDC被扩展到一个领域，它不是最初设计的，但它被证明是一个非常强大的工具。

This Political Science Infrastructure project creates a uniform citation standard for social science data sources. Analogous to the impact of standards for citing textual sources, this facilitates connections between research and researchers. It thereby improves the scientific process and advances the accumulation of knowledge. The use of standard data source citations expands replication efforts and eases these efforts, increasing researcher productivity and allowing more resources to be devoted to new research. Science progresses as scientists create more links with other scientists. Text references are done so often that they are taken for granted for how fundamentally important they have become. In the last 50 years, quantitative work has become roughly half of what journals publish and we there is no comparable citation standard for data. This project builds a simple yet critical piece of infrastructure, a uniform standard for deep citation of data, offers startling and significant savings of time and resources and consequent gains in research productivity.One might conclude that the explosive growth of electronic press and of electronic data dissemination would solve the problem of linkages between cited and source data. The amount and rate of knowledge in circulation certainly has increased dramatically, yet in the absence of uniform standards for citing data the problem is being exacerbated, not resolved. Given the short average duration of URLs on the web, the growing citation of online data sets is a problem, or possibly an opportunity, but definitely not an answer. It is obvious that an online source cited in a manuscript printed out today may note be the same source available at the web address even tomorrow, let alone when the manuscript is published or at some future date. Citations to sources that cannot be retrieved are useless.Deep citation of text means that one text source can unambiguously reference another source or any portion of that source in a manner such that the source can be retrieved by another reader years or decades hence. For books, the author, title, publisher, and page number is enough to retrieve any specific phrase referenced. Deep citation of data means the same, but involves new technological issues, issues that are addressed in this project. Readers need to be able to retrieve the original data set, in the same version, identify the same variables, use the same recodes, and in some instances be able to conduct the same analysis. To facilitate this process, the investigators develop uniform citation standards for social science publishing and create a test-bed or prototype tools for electronic linkage of data citations and source data.Political science as a discipline has been in the forefront historically in the building of social science infrastructure, including creation of the world's largest archive of social science data (the ICPSR), development of the first general-purpose commercial statistical packages (SPSS), and the ongoing data dissemination developments at the Virtual Data Center. Each development originated from within political science, and greatly benefited political science research. But each also represents the discipline's continuing contribution to the infrastructure of scientific research well beyond the disciplines own intellectual boundaries. This project will have implications as broad.The investigators proceed on two fronts, first in the development of a standardized digital signature for cited data, second to create tools to electronically connect and to retrieve data from source data. In order to establish uniform data citation standards and create new tools for electronic linkage of data citations and sources the researchers capitalize on the digital library work already in progress at the Harvard-MIT Data Center for development of a virtual data center (VDC). This project can seamlessly extend the VDC platform at low marginal cost and adds substantial value to the VDC system as a public good in perpetuity. In this project the VDC is extended to an area where it was not originallydesigned but for which it proves to be a very powerful tool.