Definitions and theories

Statistics Canada provides a comprehensive and articulated description of administrative data, its underlying principles, user guidelines and quality indicators. [FRA-ENG]

Afristat in a working paper compares data from administrative and survey data sources, with a particular focus on education and health statistics. It also focuses on the  need to verify the quality of statistical information derived from administrative data. [FRA]

INED’s working paper, entitled "The use of administrative sources in demography, sociology and social statistics", coordinated by François Héran and Jean-Claude Sebag and to which many researchers contributed, addresses the need to mobilize existing data, while providing several examples of the use of administrative data (e. g. electoral lists and participation, annual tax data) and census data. [FRA] 

Svein Nordbotten’s article published in the Swedish Journal of Official Statistics focuses on the past, present and future use of tax data in official statistics with special attention to the Nordic countries. [ENG]

The scientific article by Connelly et al. entitled "The role of administrative data in the big data revolution in social science research" and published in 2016 in the journal "Social Science research" proposes a definition of big data and administrative big data with a broad review of the existing literature. It describes the opportunities and challenges of this type of data in terms of analysis, management, production, quality, access and data matching. [ENG]

Anders and Britt Wallgren’s book "Register-based Statistics: Administrative Data for Statistical Purposes" focuses on the theoretical aspects of population register statistics in terms of definitions and methodology. It describes the operation of population registers in general and the Swedish register in particular.  [ENG]

The scientific paper by Michel Poulain and Anne Herm published on Population in 2013 describes and compares the principles of operation of the centralised registry in 30 European countries and how individual data are extracted from it in order to produce population statistics. [FRA-ENG]

An article on challenges in administrative data linkage for research.

An article on the challenges of linking and using in administrative data from different sources.

An article on the use of data linkage to evaluate the consistency of place of residence between census data and tax data.

An article on the challenges of linking survey and administrative data, with examples of research projects in labor economics using linked data.

An article on the linkage of survey and administrative data to measure income, inequality and mobility.

An article on the challenge of reproducible research with administrative social science data.

An article on the role of administrative data in the data revolution in social science research.

An article with a guidance for information about linking data sets.