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CS 257: Software Design

Prof. Jean Salac - Winter 2025

Citing Your Data

There is no universally recognized and agreed upon way to cite data, but these guidelines can help.

Main Goal: quick identification and evaluation

Make sure that you and your reader understand the following so that everyone understands more about how to interpret your visualizations.

  1. Authorship (scholar or agency)
  2. Date of publication
  3. Title of Dataset (usually italicized)
  4. Edition or version
  5. Publisher and/or Distributor
  6. Access information (URL or DOI)

For example:

Smith, T.W., Marsden, P.V., & Hout, M. (2011). General social survey, 1972-2010 cumulative file (ICPSR31521-v1) [data file and codebook]. Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center [producer]. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor]. doi: 10.3886/ICPSR31521.v1

Data citation guides