Intro to Citing eHRAF

The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) team appreciates your using our ethnographic and archaeological online eHRAF databases for coursework, cross-cultural research and in your publications. We encourage you to use data from the eHRAF databases and the tables/printable lists from HRAF’s homepage, but we ask that you give HRAF acknowledgement when publishing your data. The HRAF staff puts considerable effort into the compilation and construction of the databases. The following are examples of these efforts:

• HRAF’s subject-indexing system based on the Outline of Cultural Materials (Murdock et al. 2008)

• the selection of cultures and archaeological traditions that make up the whole collection

• the construction of the sample subsets (such as the PSF and the SRS)

• the accompanying information in the collection description (brief description of the culture, region, sub-region, time coverage).

Also keep in mind that HRAF depends largely on membership dues for support. Reading publications that use data from eHRAF and/or mention HRAF not only shows staff the value of their hard work, but reference to HRAF data in publications also stimulates interest and possible new HRAF memberships. More memberships enable us to have the resources to add more features and cultures to eHRAF.