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Humanities and Social Sciences Data Center
Numeric Data Research Guide
Scholarly Communications Center
Rutgers University Libraries
Rutgers University
The Cross National Time Series Database was purchased by Rutgers University Libraries for use by Rutgers faculty, staff, and students. The database was purchased from Databanks International, 13 Carhart Avenue, Binghamton, NY 13905. The Scholarly Communication Center at Rutgers University's Alexander Library has provided web-access (with permission from the vendor) to this important data source. Rutgers University students, faculty, and staff may obtain a password by emailing the Data Librarian.
Searching for data in the CNTS database is intuitive and simple to master. At the main search page, you will see three pick-lists which will enable you to select countries, years and variables. Note that up to 60 countries and 120 variables can be selected at one time. All years are available to search. Conventions for selecting items from the pick-lists are standard for web browsers. In particular, Cntrl-click allows you to select multiple items one-by-one. A Cntrl-click on one item and a subsequent shift-click on another item will select all of the intervening items in the pick-list. Alternatively, the user can simply click and drag the list.
Once the browser has returned a table of data, you will note that each variable is hyperlinked to an explanation of that variable and any scaling characteristics that are used in the presentation. You can return to your results page by closing the new window that pops up with the information.
Please note that the database only returns entries that exists. If two countries (for example, France and New Zealand) were searched and no records for New Zealand were found, then the results will not show up. Please do not be alarmed by seeming gaps in data. These are merely gaps in data.
To familiarize yourself with the features of the site, please take the CNTS Tour.
There are three major output formats available for use with the CNTS database. The default format is browser-formatted HTML, which would be returned after a search. The other format is Excel, which the user can save the search results as. Simply click on the link to save the table as an excel spreadsheet. A variation of saving to Excel is saving to Excel sideways. This returns every country and year as a separate block. This variation would allow very wide and long tables to print more easily. The last major output format is the unformatted HTML. This is a simple HTML table which contains all of the relevant information. This table can be printed, or placed in a webpage, or inserted in some other document type.
There are a variety of tags that will be displayed as part of the data. We as yet do not have a complete description of all tags; descriptions should be forthcoming from the original data compiler. The following is a brief description of some of the tags:
| Tag | Description |
| < | Value is not scaled. |
| C | Value is computed from other variables. Check the Bibliography |
| E | Value is Compiler's Estimate |
Additional tags can be found at the Bibliography.
Note that some of the area variables will occasionally be marked with a "<". This character indicates that the particular variable is not scaled. Also, bibliographic tags are frequently shown as part of the value.