To download data and resources at ICPSR, you’ll first need to create an account. All ICPSR data users need to agree to the terms and conditions of the data you’d like to download or analyze.
Please follow these steps:
If you receive an error message, try logging in from an on-campus location or make sure you are using the VPN. You can always contact our campus Representative (see contact information on the home page of this guide), or send a request to icpsr-help@umich.edu.
From the Find Data tab, search by keyword, subject, investigator, or study number/name. You can also browse:
You can search specifically for variables and questions across studies in the Social Sciences Variables Database (SSVD). The SSVD allows users to search through over 5 million variables, representing about 76% of ICPSR's holdings.
You can also browse variables by study or browse by series.
ICPSR uses software called Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) to enable users to do statistical analysis via their Web browser. Online analysis is available for over 1,500 studies.
The software developers at UC Berkeley have online documentation for SDA.
ICPSR lets you download data in several common data formats, including:
Files are compressed and downloaded as .zip archives.
Find publications based on ICPSR data via the Bibliography of Data-Related Literature, a searchable database of over 100,000 citations to published and unpublished works resulting from analyses of data held in the ICPSR archive.
There are two ways to find citations:
Find a study via the data search and click on the Data-Related Publications tab
Search from the Data-Related Publications page
ICPSR studies can be cited by clicking the Cite This Study link in an item record, and either copying/pasting the citation or exporting it to a citation manager.
Whatever citation style is used, the essential elements of a data citation are:
See ICPSR's guide to proper research data citation for more resources on this topic.
Off-campus? Please use the Software VPN and choose the group UCIFull to access licensed content. For more information, please Click here
Software VPN is not available for guests, so they may not have access to some content when connecting from off-campus.