IJPDS International Journal of Population Data Science

Notes on Population Data

 

IJPDS is delighted to present this new call for manuscripts for our new special collection of Notes on Population Data.

This collection will consist of articles that allow researchers and practitioners to report on unexpected or underestimated data issues they encountered during their population data science projects. These can be any of the aspects of how data was collected, recorded, sampled, captured, processed, standardised, cleaned, transformed, linked, integrated, and merged/fused. Often no or only very limited details of these processes and tasks are described in journal publications. As a result, lessons learnt in data aspects are not shared with the community.

The emphasis of a Data Note should not be on the description of a data set but rather on the process of what has been done with this data from its source until it was research-ready. The readers should learn what kind of unexpected technical or organisational problems were encountered, and if or how these problems could be solved. For a list of issues that potentially can affect population data, please see the IJPDS article "Thirty-three myths and misconceptions about population data: from data capture and processing to linkage”.

Submissions to this collection should typically include the following:

• An introduction to the project upon which a Data Note is based, including a brief description of the data set(s) used, and the data challenges encountered in this project.
• A more detailed background describing the project where these data issues have occurred.
• A description of the data sources (data collections, databases, and/or data sets), such as where the data comes from and their content, structure, size, and so on. This should include basic data description, and data quality aspects as relevant to the Data Note.
• A description of the methods used in this project to (as applicable) collect, record, capture, sample, process, standardise, clean, transform, link, integrate, and merge/fuse the data set(s).
• A discussion of the data issues, problems, and challenges that have been encountered in this project.
• Lessons learnt and recommendations, the take home message for the reader that will help them limit or even prevent similar issues or mistakes from occurring in their own projects. These can include approaches taken by the authors of a Data Note to turn their data into a form suitable for their project by making them more reliable and representative.
• Conclusions of the Data Note summarising the findings and recommendations.

Please refer to the Author Guidelines/How to Format Notes on Population Data for specifics on how to format your manuscript before completing your submission.

This call will remain always open so that we can compile Notes on Population Data on a continuous basis and share this valuable corpus with the global Population Data Science community into the future.

All manuscripts must be centred on Population Data Science, as per the scope of IJPDS.

To submit a manuscript: either login to your existing account or register if you are submitting for the first time.