Share Your Data

The Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention (IFIP) Data Repository welcomes and encourages deposits of digital data. We provide a free, self-publishing deposit option and an option for sponsored projects. Data collections archived in the IFIP Data Repository are distributed for use by academic researchers. If your data relates to work supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded firearm research coordinating center, or if you are interested in paid data curation services, contact us.

Help Sharing Data

• The ICPSR Data Preparation Guide provides a comprehensive overview of data management steps that should be taken prior to depositing data.
• Contact us with any questions you have at: icpsr-help@umich.edu.
• For deposits that involve physical materials, please email: deposit@icpsr.umich.edu.

What Should My Deposit Include?

Deposits should include all data and documentation necessary to read and interpret the dataset independently. Instructions for preparing data are listed below.

For a discussion of best practices in preparing data for sharing, please refer to ICPSR’s Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving, 6th Edition. See also ICPSR’s Guidelines for Effective Data Management Plans.

Data File(s)

We encourage depositors to submit data as SAS, SPSS, or Stata files. ASCII files are also acceptable as long as they are accompanied by data definition statements. We accept additional data formats as well. Each variable in the data collection should have a set of exhaustive, mutually-exclusive codes.

Variable and value labels should clearly describe the information or question recorded in that variable.

Confidentiality and Privacy

Investigators submitting data to ICPSR are responsible for ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of research subjects. Identifiable and sensitive information must be indicated during the data archiving and submission process. If your data contain identifiable or sensitive information, they will be published as restricted access.

Documentation

Documentation files are integral to interpreting data collections. Examples of documentation files include:

• Codebooks
• Data collection instruments
• Summary statistics
• Project summaries
• Bibliographies of publications pertaining to the data

We encourage depositors to provide citations of articles that use data when they archive it. Documentation can be submitted as Microsoft Word, ASCII, and DDI XML files. Documentation that has the question text integrated with variable information is preferred.