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Citing Data, General Guidelines

Data requires citations for the same reasons journal articles and other types of publications require citations: to acknowledge the original author/producer and to help other researchers find the resource.

A dataset citation includes all of the same components as any other citation:

  • author
  • title
  • year of publication
  • publisher (for data, this is often the archive where it is housed),
  • edition or version
  • access information (a URL, DOI or other persistent identifier)

 

Be sure to follow the general citation format for the style manual your professor has asked you to use.  It is always better to provide more information about a resource rather than less!

Citing Data with APA Style

How to structure a Reference List/Works Cited entry for a data set, APA Seventh Edition:

Author/Researchers Last Name, First Initial. (Publication Date). Title of Data Set (Numerical Identifier; Version Number). [Brief description, i.e. Data Set, or Data set and code book]. Publisher or Source. Link or DOI.

Examples:

U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce. (2023). Educational Attainment, American Community Survey, ACS 1-Year Estimates Subject Tables (Table S1501). [Data Set]. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S1501?q=Educational%20Attainment

O’Donohue, W. (2017). Content analysis of undergraduate psychology textbooks (ICPSR 36966; Version V1) [Data set]. ICPSR. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36966.v1

Other notes:

  • Provide citations for data sets when you have either conducted secondary analyses of publicly archived data or archived your own data being presented for the first time in the current work.
  • If you are citing existing data or statistics, cite the publication in which the data were published (e.g., a journal article, report, or webpage) rather than the data set itself.