Our paper An Empirical Survey of the Population of United States Tax Court Written Decisions was recently published in the Virginia Tax Review. We have just placed supplementary materials online (click here or above to access).
Simply put, our paper is a “dataset paper.” While common in the social and physical sciences, there are far fewer (actually borderline zero) “dataset papers” in legal studies.
In our estimation, the goals of a “dataset paper” are three fold:
- (1) Introduce the data collection process with specific emphasis upon why the collection method was able to identify the targeted population
- (2) Highlight some questions that might be considered using this and other datasets
- (3) Make the data set available to various applied scholars who might like to use it
As subfields such as empirical legal studies mature (and in turn legal studies starts to look more like other scientific disciplines) it would be reasonable to expect to see additional papers of this variety. With the publication of the online supplement, we believe our paper has achieved each of these goals. Whether our efforts prove useful for others — well — only time will tell!