Are there specific data types or formats that ICPSR accepts and/or releases?

ICPSR accepts a wide range of data types and formats. For quantitative data, ICPSR encourages depositors to submit files in formats such as SAS, SPSS, Stata, or R, as these include variable-level metadata and can be readily converted to ICPSR’s archival formats.

For qualitative data, ICPSR encourages submission in plain text (.txt), rich text (.rtf), Microsoft Word (*.doc, *.docx), or scanned images of text with optical character recognition (OCR) as a PDF (.pdf). Please see the Guide for Sharing Qualitative Data for more information.

Some archives within ICPSR may have different preferred file formats depending on their data types or disciplinary standards. Some deposits may include CSV or JSON files, which are commonly used by researchers working in programming environments such as Python or R. These formats may be acceptable for deposit. Datasets in other formats (images, videos, etc) are accepted as well in accordance with ICPSR’s Collection Development Policy. Depositors are encouraged to review the guidance for their specific archive or contact ICPSR-help@umich.edu with questions, including non-standard formats.

ICPSR Archival/Release Formats
ICPSR makes quantitative data files available in several widely used formats, including SAS, SPSS, Stata, R, and tab-delimited text files. When possible, ICPSR makes qualitative files available in PDF, plain text (.txt), or rich text (.rtf) formats.