The Impact of Multiple Births on Fertility: Stopping and Spacing in the United States During the Demographic Transition.

Multiple births strain mothers' and families' resources in ways that should highlight preferences for family size, birth spacing, and parity-dependent stopping behavior. Couples with surviving twins reach their target family size sooner than other couples and should be more likely to practice family limitation. Twins are also a greater burden on the mother's time and health, which could lead to postponing the next birth, even among couples who want additional children.

Reflections on the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS).

The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) encourages sharing historical life course data by storing data in a common format. To encompass the complexity of life histories, IDS relies on data structures that are unfamiliar to most social scientists. This article examines four features of IDS that make it flexible and expandable: the Entity-Attribute-Value model, the relational database model, embedded metadata, and the Chronicle file.

The Data Tags Suite (DATS) model for discovering data access and use requirements.

Background: Data reuse is often controlled to protect the privacy of subjects and patients. Data discovery tools need ways to inform researchers about restrictions on data access and re-use.

Results: We present elements in the Data Tags Suite (DATS) metadata schema describing data access, data use conditions, and consent information.

Re-introducing the Cambridge Group Family Reconstitutions.

was important both for its scope and its methodology. The volume was based on data from family reconstitutions of 26 parishes carefully selected to represent 250 years of English demographic history. These data remain relevant for new research questions, such as studying the intergenerational inheritance of fertility and mortality.

The Evolution of Models in Historical Demography.

This reflection on the evolution of methods and data in historical demography argues that we can still find inspiration and guidance in the work of the founders of our discipline. Historical demography is in the midst of a transition from a data-poor to a data-rich environment. Previous generations relied on demographic models to squeeze as much information as possible from the small amounts of data available.

Responsible practices for data sharing.

Research transparency, reproducibility, and data sharing uphold core principles of science at a time when the integrity of scientific research is being questioned. This article discusses how research data in psychology can be made accessible for reproducibility and reanalysis by describing practical ways to overcome barriers to data sharing. We examine key issues surrounding the sharing of data such as who owns research data, how to protect the confidentiality of the research participant, how to give appropriate credit to the data creator, how to deal with metadata and codebooks, how to address provenance, and other specifics such as versioning and file formats.

A publicly available benchmark for biomedical dataset retrieval: the reference standard for the 2016 bioCADDIE dataset retrieval challenge.

https://biocaddie.org/benchmark-data.

DATS, the data tag suite to enable discoverability of datasets.

Today's science increasingly requires effective ways to find and access existing datasets that are distributed across a range of repositories. For researchers in the life sciences, discoverability of datasets may soon become as essential as identifying the latest publications via PubMed. Through an international collaborative effort funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, we have designed and implemented the DAta Tag Suite (DATS) model to support the DataMed data discovery index.

Finding useful data across multiple biomedical data repositories using DataMed.

The value of broadening searches for data across multiple repositories has been identified by the biomedical research community. As part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge initiative, we work with an international community of researchers, service providers and knowledge experts to develop and test a data index and search engine, which are based on metadata extracted from various data sets in a range of repositories. DataMed is designed to be, for data, what PubMed has been for the scientific literature.

IDS Transposer: A Users Guide.

The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) provides a standard format for storing and sharing individual-level longitudinal life-course data (Alter and Mandemakers 2014; Alter, Mandemakers and Gutmann 2009). Once the data are in the IDS format, a standard set of programs can be used to extract data for analysis, facilitating the analysis of data across multiple databases. Currently, life-course databases store information in a variety of formats, and the process of translating data into IDS can be long and tedious.

Addressing Global Data Sharing Challenges.

This issue of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics highlights the ethical issues that arise when researchers conducting projects in low- and middle-income countries seek to share the data they produce. Although sharing data is considered a best practice, the barriers to doing so are considerable and there is a need for guidance and examples. To that end, the authors of this article reviewed the articles in this special issue to identify challenges common to the five countries and to offer some practical advice to assist researchers in navigating this "uncharted territory," as some termed it.

The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) for Longitudinal Historical Microdata, version 4.

The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) is a standard data format that has been adopted by several large longitudinal databases on historical populations. Since the publication of the first version in Historical Social Research in 2009, two improved and extended versions have been published in the Collaboratory Historical Life Courses. In this publication we present version 4 which is the latest 'official' standard of the IDS.

Effects of Inheritance and Environment on the Heights of Brothers in Nineteenth-Century Belgium.

Shared genetic inheritance results in a high correlation in the heights of brothers, but experiences in childhood and adolescence can intervene. Poor diet, disease, and heavy labor can prevent the achievement of height potentials. If families cannot control variations in these conditions, the heights of brothers will be less strongly correlated.

Widowhood, family size, and post-reproductive mortality: a comparative analysis of three populations in nineteenth-century Europe.

Researchers from a number of disciplines have offered competing theories about the effects oJ childbearing on parents 'postreproductive longevity. The "disposable soma theory" argues that investments in somatic maintenance increase longevity but reduce childbearing. "Maternal depletion" models suggest that the rigors of childrearing increase mortality in later years.

Childhood conditions, migration, and mortality: migrants and natives in 19th-century cities.

Migrants often have lower mortality than natives in spite of relatively unfavorable social and economic characteristics. Although migrants have a short-run advantage due to the selective migration of healthy workers, persistent health and mortality differences between migrants and natives may be long-run effects of different experiences in childhood. We made use of a natural experiment resulting from rural-to-urban migration in the mid-19th century.

Height, frailty, and the standard of living: modelling the effects of diet and disease on declining mortality and increasing height.

Explanations of historical trends in both mortality and human height differ over the relative contributions of better nutrition and reduced exposure to disease. This paper explores theoretical models in which interactions between diet and disease determine both mortality and height. One model assumes that adult height is directly related to frailty, the relative risk of dying.