How to Cite the SHRUG

The SHRUG is above all else a data platform and set of consistent geographic identifiers to facilitate the sharing of data between different research teams. As a convenience, we have included many actual fields with socioeconomic data. But users of these data should cite the researchers who originally prepared, processed, and linked their data to the SHRUG. In other words, if you use many parts of the SHRUG in your analysis, you will need to cite many different research papers – please do not just cite the SHRUG paper, or the work these researchers have put in will go unrecognized.

For example, if you use the SHRUG to study the impact of some political variable on rural road construction, you should additionally cite Jensenius and Verniers (2017) for the political data and Asher and Novosad (2020) for the roads data. When you download the SHRUG data, the platform will helpfully generate for you a list of citations that correspond to the data that you selected for download. The citation is also viewable in the metadata pages section of this website.