The LEADS database at ICPSR: Identifying important “at risk” social science data. Paper presented at the Quantitative Methodology Open Refereed Roundtable session at the 2008 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting

ICPSR has created a database to document information about the thousands of social science studies that have been conducted over the last 40 years. Included in the database are descriptions of social science data collections funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. These records are supplemented with additional information gathered through correspondence with principal investigators of those awards with the goal of gathering information about the public availability of any research data collected with grant support. The goal of this paper is to describe the LEADS database and provide results regarding the scope of social science research data that are “at risk ” of being lost. In the social science research community there have been longstanding expectations and mechanisms for archiving and sharing data. Even with this expectation, analysis of the LEADS database shows that the majority – nearly 75 %-- of researcher-initiated social science research data is not archived publicly. Further, we find that a substantia