What are ICPSR Thematic Collections?

ICPSR has a number of “thematic collections,” also sometimes called “topical archives.” These are typically a result of one or more external organization(s) providing funding for ICPSR to curate, share, and preserve data to support research in a given area. Sometimes the collection is purely topical, such as the National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture (NADAC). In other cases, the data have been collected with support from the funding organization. The Health and Medical Care Archive (HMCA), for example, houses data collected with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Data Repository (PCODR) is the archive of record for data collected by grantees of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Still other topical archives are a combination of the two.  

Why is this important?

Thematic collection websites are a great place to start exploring data if you are interested in a broad topic area but don’t know exactly what you’re looking for (think “getting ideas for your next research project”). These collections quickly narrow the focus to a subset of ICPSR’s data. However, because decisions about what to include are made collaboratively with the funding agency, and there is a pre-specified curation budget, browsing their websites may not provide an exhaustive list of the data ICPSR holds on a given topic. If you search for something specific in one of the thematic collections, the results returned are only those that are a part of that collection. You may have better luck running the same search on an ICPSR-branded page such as the “Find Data” page.