1.  Informed Consent Form for CFPS respondents

Before each wave of the CFPS interview, an Informed Consent Form will be signed with the respondents. For respondents aged 15 and above, they sign the form themselves; for those under 15, their guardians sign on their behalf. Some journals may require authors to provide information about the Informed Consent Form during the submission process. You can find the CFPS Informed Consent Form in Chinese from the project website.

2.  IRB Approval

Some journals may require authors to confirm whether the project has passed an ethical review and provide related information. CFPS adheres to relevant regulations, regularly submitting ethical review or continuing review applications to the "Peking University Biomedical Institutional Review Board" (PU IRB). In the follow-up survey, we will continue to submit ongoing review applications to the ethics committee in subsequent years. The IRB approval number (IRB00001052-14010) for the CFPS project remains unchanged across different waves. As you are using CFPS for secondary data analysis and are not the data collector, typically providing this information is sufficient for submission requirements. If you indeed need a scanned copy of the approval in Chinese, please contact our project office through email and submit an application for a scanned copy with supplementary materials (your CV, the purpose of your application along with proofs such as the editor’s email, funding requirement or dissertation requirement).

3.  Data Sharing Regulations

With increasing academic requirements for research transparency and reproducibility, many journals are recommending authors to submit data and code supporting their papers to ensure research rigor. Peking University owns the copyrights of CFPS data. Users are not permitted to publicly share CFPS data on journal websites or unauthorized third-party platforms, either in its original or modified form.

To meet journals' data sharing requirements, authors can provide the official registration information for the CFPS public-use dataset, allowing readers to directly access and download the required data. If the authors wish, they can upload processed datasets and code to the CFPS data center or Peking University's open research data platform, both of which support dataset and code sharing and can meet some journals' requirements for dataset DOI. After ensuring no content violates the CFPS data user agreement, programming codes written by the authors can be placed on a platform the user deems appropriate.

CFPS restricted data such as geocodes at county, prefecture and city levels must be accessed from designated locations approved by the Institute of Social Science Survey (ISSS) at Peking University. Inquiries can be sent to cfpsdata@pku.edu.cn.

The data sharing regulations have been in effect since 2013 as part of the data user agreement. The CFPS office recently made them available in English (as of December 2024)  on a separate webpage to facilitate communication between CFPS users and journal editors.