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Informatics and Data Sharing

New standards, protocols, and software for citing, sharing, analyzing, archiving, preserving, distributing, cataloging, translating, disseminating, naming, verifying, and replicating scholarly research data and analyses. Also includes proposals to improve the norms of data sharing and replication in science.
"The replication standard holds that sufficient information exists with which to understand, evaluate, and build upon a prior work if a third party can replicate the results without any additional information from the author." This, and the data sharing to support it, was proposed for political science, along with policy suggestions in King, Gary. 1995. Replication, Replication. PS: Political Science and Politics 28: 443–499.Abstract
Article
Political science is a community enterprise and the community of empirical political scientists need access to the body of data necessary to replicate existing studies to understand, evaluate, and especially build on this work. Unfortunately, the norms we have in place now do not encourage, or in some cases even permit, this aim. Following are suggestions that would facilitate replication and are easy to implement – by teachers, students, dissertation writers, graduate programs, authors, reviewers, funding agencies, and journal and book editors.
King, Gary. 2006. Publication, Publication. PS: Political Science and Politics 39: 119–125. See continuing updates to this articleAbstract
Article
I show herein how to write a publishable paper by beginning with the replication of a published article. This strategy seems to work well for class projects in producing papers that ultimately get published, helping to professionalize students into the discipline, and teaching them the scientific norms of the free exchange of academic information. I begin by briefly revisiting the prominent debate on replication our discipline had a decade ago and some of the progress made in data sharing since.

The Dataverse Network Project

The Dataverse Network Project: a major ongoing project to write web applications, standards, protocols, and software for automating the process of citing, archiving, preserving, distributing, cataloging, translating, disseminating, naming, verifying, and replicating data and associated analyses (Website: TheData.Org). See also:
King, Gary. 2007. An Introduction to the Dataverse Network as an Infrastructure for Data Sharing. Sociological Methods and Research 36: 173–199.Abstract
Article
We introduce a set of integrated developments in web application software, networking, data citation standards, and statistical methods designed to put some of the universe of data and data sharing practices on somewhat firmer ground. We have focused on social science data, but aspects of what we have developed may apply more widely. The idea is to facilitate the public distribution of persistent, authorized, and verifiable data, with powerful but easy-to-use technology, even when the data are confidential or proprietary. We intend to solve some of the sociological problems of data sharing via technological means, with the result intended to benefit both the scientific community and the sometimes apparently contradictory goals of individual researchers.

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Gutmann, Myron P, Mark Abrahamson, Margaret O Adams, Micah Altman, Caroline Arms, Kenneth Bollen, Michael Carlson, et al. 2009. From Preserving the Past to Preserving the Future: The Data-PASS Project and the Challenges of Preserving Digital Social Science Data. Library Trends 57: 315–337.Abstract
Article
Social science data are an unusual part of the past, present, and future of digital preservation. They are both an unqualified success, due to long-lived and sustainable archival organizations, and in need of further development because not all digital content is being preserved. This article is about the Data Preservation Alliance for Social Sciences (Data-PASS), a project supported by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), which is a partnership of five major U.S. social science data archives. Broadly speaking, Data-PASS has the goal of ensuring that at-risk social science data are identified, acquired, and preserved, and that we have a future-oriented organization that could collaborate on those preservation tasks for the future. Throughout the life of the Data-PASS project we have worked to identify digital materials that have never been systematically archived, and to appraise and acquire them. As the project has progressed, however, it has increasingly turned its attention from identifying and acquiring legacy and at-risk social science data to identifying on going and future research projects that will produce data. This article is about the project's history, with an emphasis on the issues that underlay the transition from looking backward to looking forward.

The Virtual Data Center

The Virtual Data Center, the predecessor to the Dataverse Network. See:
Altman, Micah, Leonid Andreev, Mark Diggory, Gary King, Daniel L Kiskis, Elizabeth Kolster, Michael Krot, and Sidney Verba. 2001. A Digital Library for the Dissemination and Replication of Quantitative Social Science Research. Social Science Computer Review 19: 458–470.Abstract
Article
The Virtual Data Center (VDC) software is an open-source, digital library system for quantitative data. We discuss what the software does, and how it provides an infrastructure for the management and dissemination of disturbed collections of quantitative data, and the replication of results derived from this data.

See Also

Gary King's Replication Data Sets (Website: Data Sets)

Related Papers on New Forms of Data

King, Gary, Gary King, Kay Schlozman, and Norman Nie. 2009. The Changing Evidence Base of Social Science Research. In The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives. New York: Routledge Press.Abstract
Chapter PDF
This (two-page) article argues that the evidence base of political science and the related social sciences are beginning an underappreciated but historic change.
Abrahamson, Mark, Kenneth A Bollen, Myron P Gutmann, Gary King, and Amy Pienta. 2009. Preserving Quantitative Research-Elicited Data for Longitudinal Analysis. New Developments in Archiving Survey Data in the U.S.. Historical Social Research 34, no. 3: 51-59.Abstract
Article
Social science data collected in the United States, both historically and at present, have often not been placed in any public archive -- even when the data collection was supported by government grants. The availability of the data for future use is, therefore, in jeopardy. Enforcing archiving norms may be the only way to increase data preservation and availability in the future.
Lazer, David, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, et al. 2009. Computational Social Science. Science 323: 721-723.Abstract
Article
A field is emerging that leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data at a scale that may reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors.