Hints for Authors and Editorial Team of the SOEPpapers

The SOEPpapers are the chief platform for publishing research results based on SOEP data. As SOEP is a multidisciplinary panel, the SOEPpapers publishes work from all social scientific disciplines.

SOEPpapers are published on a non-exclusive basis, thereby allowing authors to publish their articles elsewhere if they wish. SOEP encourages that all papers appear in other professional, institutional, and locally oriented publications as well.

All researchers who work with SOEP data directly or as part of another data set are invited to submit their work to this series and to thereby present it to a broad audience for discussion.

Submissions are accepted at any time and should be sent to the mail address mentioned below!

Hints for Authors

The process of accepting submissions to SOEPpapers is straightforward. If a paper has already appeared in another discussion paper series with a quality control process (e.g. IZA, NBER, LIS, WZB or in an academic series like that of the University of Zurich), it will be accepted automatically as a SOEPpaper. Reformatting of the text is usually not necessary.

Otherwise, the submission will be evaluated by a member of the editorial team. If an evaluation is necessary, it will always result in a "yes" or "no" decision. There are no referee reports.

There are no special requirements in terms of formating. Please keep in mind that people should be able to read the paper easily, even the tables.

Before sending us a paper, we strongly recommend that you check it carefully for errors. We do not update or replace the online versions of our papers.

Please send your paper in docx or pdf format to soeppapers@diw.de

After publication, we normally register and archive your article as a SOEPpaper in the online publication databases or repositories RePEc and EconStor. To make your article easier to find, it is helpful to tag it with freely selectable keywords and/or JEL codes. An abstract is mandatory.

SOEPpapers, like all other publications using SOEP data, must be accompanied by a literature reference. Please use one of the following articles for this purpose. Among other things, this also serves to make your database, the SOEP (or, if applicable, PanelWhiz or other SOEP sub-samples), accessible to other researchers:

Goebel, Jan, Markus M. Grabka, Stefan Liebig, Martin Kroh, David Richter, Carsten Schröder, and Jürgen Schupp. 2019. The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik / Journal of Economics and Statistics 239, no. 2, 345-360, doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2018-0022.

For PanelWhiz use the following citation:

John P. Haisken-DeNew and Markus H. Hahn. 2010. PanelWhiz: Efficient Data Extraction of Complex Panel Data Sets – An Example Using the German SOEP. Schmollers Jahrbuch 130, no. 4, 643-654.

If you do not exclude the migration sample cases from your analysis, please also cite:

Herbert Brücker, Martin Kroh, Simone Bartsch, Jan Goebel, Simon Kühne, Elisabeth Liebau, Parvati Trübswetter, Ingrid Tucci & Jürgen Schupp (2014): The new IAB-SOEP Migration Sample: an introduction into the methodology and the contents. SOEP Survey Paper 216, Series C. Berlin: DIW Berlin.

If you do not exclude cases from the refugee samples in your analysis, please also cite:

Brücker, H., Kosyakova, Y., Rother, N., Zinn, S., Liebau, E., Gider, W., Schwanhäuser, S., & Siegert, M. (2025): Exploring Integration and Migration Dynamics: The Research Potentials of a Large-Scale Longitudinal Household Study of Refugees in Germany. European Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaf032.

If you use data from the SOEP-LEE2 surveys in your analysis, please also cite:

Matiaske, W., Schmidt, T. D., Halbmeier, C., Maas, M., Holtmann, D., Schröder, C., Böhm, T., Liebig, S., and Kritikos, A. S. (2023). SOEP-LEE2: Linking Surveys on Employees to Employers in Germany. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik Data Observer, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2023-0031.

Because precise references to data sources are becoming increasingly important in the scientific research community, the SOEP group strongly recommends citing the SOEP data.

Among other things, in order to facilitate reanalysis, the various data versions of the SOEP data set are now assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) (for more information on this have a look here).

To ensure a correct reference to the respective SOEP data used in each case, please refer to the citation method on our RDC SOEP pages in the Data  tab (under current version/all editions) and in the Data Set Information section on the websites of the individual editions. If you do not exclude cases from the migration or refugee samples in your analysis, please cite these as well!

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