ICPSR Data Communication Scholarship

Opportunity Description:

Students from ICPSR member institutions are eligible to win scholarships of $1,000 (first place) or $750 (second place) for creating a short video to promote a study in the ICPSR catalog. Realizing that coursework requirements and assignments have changed since the ICPSR Paper Competition was launched in 2007, we are giving the competition a major facelift to better match what students are being asked to do in an era of more creative, less traditional assignments. Upon completing the video, students should have gained experience navigating and searching ICPSR, identifying data of interest, and using the information provided for each study to determine potential uses of the data.

Formerly known as the ICPSR Research Paper Competition.

Minimum Qualifications and/or Eligibility Requirements: 

What to Submit: 

1. An entry form that includes information about the submitter(s) and the data.
2. The link to a video, no longer than 2 minutes in length, that describes an ICPSR study that gives the viewer a “run down” of the important points and a glimpse at potential uses. Details about what to include can be found in the “Preparing Your Entry” section.

Preparing Your Entry:

1. To be eligible, students must attend a school that is a member of ICPSR. If you are unsure whether your school is a member, please check the member list.
2. Students entering the competition must graduate or have graduated no earlier than April 1 of the year prior to submission. For example, students entering in 2024 have to graduate April 1, 2023, or later.
3. Studies chosen for the videos must be part of ICPSR's curated collection. Specifically, studies found in OpenICPSR and studies with a description that contains a link to another site from which to get the data are not eligible. Note: some study description pages point to the project’s website for further description – that’s okay, as long as you can download the data from the ICPSR page (clicking on download lists files in formats such as SPSS, Stata, SAS, R, and ASCII or CSV as well as documentation files).
4. Studies chosen should be “members-only.” Studies in this category have a note on the right side of the study homepage that looks like this: 
   These are the studies that your institution helped make available!
5. We encourage you to search all of the collection, but you can also start your search with only the eligible studies.

Application Process: 

Papers must be submitted electronically via the ICPSR Research Paper Competition Entry and Publication Release Form.

Application Deadline generally falls on January 31.