Publications

An essential aspect of science is a community of scholars cooperating and competing in the pursuit of common goals. A critical component of this community is the common language of and the universal standards for scholarly citation, credit attribution, and the location and retrieval of articles and books. We propose a similar universal standard for citing quantitative data that retains the advantages of print citations, adds other components made possible by, and needed due to, the digital form and systematic nature of quantitative data sets, and is consistent with most existing subfield-specific approaches. Although the digital library field includes numerous creative ideas, we limit ourselves to only those elements that appear ready for easy practical use by scientists, journal editors, publishers, librarians, and archivists.

Since the replication standard was proposed for political science research, more journals have required or encouraged authors to make data available, and more authors have shared their data. The calls for continuing this trend are more persistent than ever, and the agreement among journal editors in this Symposium continues this trend. In this article, I offer a vision of a possible future of the replication movement. The plan is to implement this vision via the Virtual Data Center project, (pre-Dataverse) which – by automating the process of finding, sharing, archiving, subsetting, converting, analyzing, and distributing data – may greatly facilitate adherence to the replication standard.

The Virtual Data Center (VDC) software is an open-source, digital library system for quantitative data. We discuss what the software does, and how it provides an infrastructure for the management and dissemination of disturbed collections of quantitative data, and the replication of results derived from this data.

Political science is a community enterprise and the community of empirical political scientists need access to the body of data necessary to replicate existing studies to understand, evaluate, and especially build on this work. Unfortunately, the norms we have in place now do not encourage, or in some cases even permit, this aim. Following are suggestions that would facilitate replication and are easy to implement – by teachers, students, dissertation writers, graduate programs, authors, reviewers, funding agencies, and journal and book editors.