InfoGuides: Find/Use Data: ICPSR: Start Using ICPSR

Digital Scholarship Center

Wendy Mann

She/Her

Email Me

Contact:

Director, Digital Scholarship Center (DiSC)
2703 Fenwick Library
Fairfax Campus
wmann@gmu.edu

703.993.5272

Subjects: Data & Statistics

Start Using ICPSR

Search the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) social science data archive's more than 500,000 files of research in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. ICPSR is an international consortium of over 700 academic institutions and research organizations. George Mason University has an institutional membership to ICPSR.

If you are using ICPSR for the first time:

access ICPSR through the databases link on the library website.
ICPSR will recognize you as a George Mason affiliate and you will then have the ability to create your own MyData account.
Instead of creating a MyData account, you can sign in using Google, LinkedIn, or ORCiD.

You will be asked to login with your ICPSR MyData account when you are downloading a dataset.

You can search for datasets without logging in. Even if you are accessing the ICPSR site from on campus, or have logged in through the library website, you will still be asked to login to ICPSR using your MyData account. One feature of the account is that it keeps track of past datasets you've downloaded. You need to agree to ICPSR's terms of use before you can download a dataset.

ICPSR FAQs
Use this quick reference to get answers to commonly asked questions.
Video Tutorials & Webinars from ICPSR
Access these useful videos for in-depth information about how to do a task or to learn about a specific data collection.
Glossary of Social Science Terms
ICPSR News

The ICPSR search box is the quickest way to get started. Use the search box to search for studies (data), variables, and publications.

Search by the name of the study, the principle investigator, study number, keyword, subject, etc.
Many studies allow you to do basic analysis through the web browser. This feature is useful if you don't have access to software, want to examine the data, or create a subset of the data.
Browse for datasets by:
Use filters listed in the margin of the search results page to refine your search results.
Use the Thesaurus to access ICPSR's controlled vocabulary.

Data-Related Publications is a continuously-updated database of thousands of citations of works using data held in the ICPSR archive.

This is a helpful search if you really are not sure what type of dataset you're interested in. You can perform a keyword search to look for articles that have used ICPSR studies. You can read the article to understand how the study was used, and then get the information you need to access the study.

The bibliography does not contain full-text articles. You will need to search the libraries' subscriptions to get to the full-text of articles cited in this bibliography.