  Data reuse is a common practice in the social sciences. While published data
play an essential role in the production of social science research, they are
not consistently cited, which makes it difficult to assess their full scholarly
impact and give credit to the original data producers. Furthermore, it can be
challenging to understand researchers' motivations for referencing data. Like
references to academic literature, data references perform various rhetorical
functions, such as paying homage, signaling disagreement, or drawing
comparisons. This paper studies how and why researchers reference social
science data in their academic writing. We develop a typology to model
relationships between the entities that anchor data references, along with
their features (access, actions, locations, styles, types) and functions
(critique, describe, illustrate, interact, legitimize). We illustrate the use
of the typology by coding multidisciplinary research articles (n=30)
referencing social science data archived at the Inter-university Consortium for
Political and Social Research (ICPSR). We show how our typology captures
researchers' interactions with data and purposes for referencing data. Our
typology provides a systematic way to document and analyze researchers'
narratives about data use, extending our ability to give credit to data that
support research.
