2026-10-29 –, LUMC04
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is a membership-based organization that holds over 20,000 social science research data collections. To demonstrate the value of consortium membership, ICPSR must show member institutions evidence that their faculty and students are using, sharing, and publishing with data held at ICPSR. This presentation will highlight two projects at ICPSR that employ Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs to draw connections between ICPSR data, the individuals that collect and use it, and their affiliation with ICPSR member organizations. One project aims to enhance metadata on principal investigators (PIs) of ICPSR data collections with ROR IDs. The other uses open bibliographic data to connect citations in ICPSR’s Bibliography of Data-related Literature to ICPSR member institutions. Both projects enable ICPSR to share information with members about how their faculty and students are using ICPSR data and platforms.
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is an international consortium of more than 800 academic and research organizations, holding over 20,000 collections of social science and health-related data. ICPSR employs librarians and data curators who add detailed metadata to collections, and it maintains a Bibliography of Data-related Literature with over 125,000 citations linking publications to the data they analyze.
Member organizations support ICPSR's mission of curating and sharing research data, and in return their faculty and students receive free access to data, the Bibliography, and a platform for sharing their own research. To demonstrate the value of membership, ICPSR must show institutions evidence of how their communities engage with its data — a challenge when author affiliation information is missing or inconsistent.
To address this, ICPSR has undertaken two projects using persistent identifiers (PIDs) to quantify and demonstrate the impact of membership.
Project 1: Enhancing PI Metadata with ROR IDs
The first project adds Research Organization Registry identifiers (ROR IDs) to metadata records for principal investigators (PIs) of ICPSR data collections. Because ICPSR has been collecting data for over sixty years — predating PIDs — PI affiliations are stored as inconsistent text strings rather than standardized identifiers, making it difficult for member institutions to find collections affiliated with them.
To fix this, staff used OpenRefine's ROR reconciliation service to map existing affiliation strings to ROR IDs. In stage 1, this information was maintained in a shared spreadsheet and explored via a Java application. In stage 2, ICPSR has updated its metadata schema to include ROR IDs for PI affiliations, organizational PIs, and funding agencies. In the new schema, depositors can add ROR IDs directly when they share data with ICPSR, and staff are retrofitting older records. This lays the groundwork for improved discovery and reporting.
Project 2: Connecting Bibliography Citations to Member Institutions
The second project uses open bibliographic data to link citations in ICPSR's Bibliography to member institutions. The Bibliography's in-house software captures all necessary elements of a citation, but most citations were added before the widespread adoption of personal and institutional identifiers, leaving a gap in understanding regarding who publishes using ICPSR data. However, the Bibliography does collect digital object identifiers (DOIs) for publications, making it possible to find affiliation metadata.
Using those DOIs, a custom Python program matches the affiliations of authors in the Bibliography to institutions and their ROR IDs via OpenAlex, an open-source index connecting authors, institutions, and funders to citations. The resulting affiliation data supports targeted outreach to current members and to frequent ICPSR data users who are not yet members.
This presentation will discuss the outcomes of each of these projects and share examples of how they have been used to communicate with ICPSR’s members.
Megan Chenoweth is a senior associate librarian and metadata manager at ICPSR at the University of Michigan, where she oversees metadata quality and standards for over 20,000 social science research data collections.
