Call for manuscripts
Notes on Population Data
IJPDS is delighted to present this call for manuscripts for our special collection, Notes on Population Data.
Notes on Population Data provides a unique opportunity to publish and share such issues and general lessons learned with the wider community.
A Data Note is a short article describing the problems encountered in the data pipeline that enables the reader to learn something for their own projects.
The emphasis should be on the process of what has been done in the data pipeline from its source until it was research-ready, not a description of a data set or the results obtained. Data Notes are brief reports on unexpected technical or organisational problems encountered, and provide information on how these problems were, or could be, solved.
For a list of issues that potentially can affect population data and a description of the data pipeline, we encourage all authors of Data Note manuscripts to read the IJPDS article "Thirty-three myths and misconceptions about population data: from data capture and processing to linkage".
NOTE: A Data Note is not a report on data science projects that did not result in any useful end product or analysis, especially due to statistical design issues, or legal or organisational constraints. Please do not describe the outcomes of your research.
Submissions to this collection should typically follow the format provided below, with an overall limit of around 3,000 words:
Context
Provide a short description of the purpose and aims of the project where these data issues occurred.
Give a basic description of the data set(s) used, and summary of data quality aspects relevant to the Data Note. Include a description of the data sources (data collections, databases, or data sets). Include only relevant information such as where the data comes from, data capture (collected, recorded, or sampled from), the contents, structure, size, etc.
Add a brief overview of the methods used in the data pipeline of this project, such as data cleaning, data processing, and/or data linking methods used, as relevant to the data issues described below.
Data Issues
Outline of the data issues, problems and challenges encountered in your project. This can include, but is not limited, to how data quality aspects, difficulty of data collection, incomplete or biased data, or previously unknown data characteristics resulted in a data science project not being able to progress as planned. Problems and challenges that occurred during data processing and linkage, including limitations in functionalities of the software used for processing or linkage, or data aspects which made processing or linking problematic or even impossible, should be described.
Solution
Explain how you resolved the issues, problems, and challenges. These explanations should be related to what you described in the previous section. They should not describe project-specific aspects, but rather more general solutions so that readers who encounter similar projects can learn from them and potentially apply these or similar solutions.
(Please do not include problems due to legal or organisational restrictions, or statistical design issues).
Generalisable Lesson
Provide recommendations and lessons learnt with take-home messages for the reader that will help them limit or even prevent similar issues or mistakes from occurring in their projects. Please summarise your recommendations and lessons as being of general interest rather than being specific to the project described in the manuscript. You may include approaches taken to turn your data into a form suitable for your project by making them more reliable or useful for inferences about a population.
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 permanently open in order to 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.