«How to Use Online Genealogies for Historical Demography» | New publication by Robert Stelter in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) joint with Diego Alburez-Gutierrez
In their recent paper in PNAS, Robert Stelter and Diego Alburez-Gutierrez analyzed the pitfalls and opportunities of using online genealogies to study long-term demographic processes.
“We show that online genealogies contain important biases and that ignoring them may cause misleading results. We focused on lifespan dynamics, but the same is true for other demographic processes,” says Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR). A new paper published in PNAS with Robert Stelter from the University of Basel points to these biases and outlines the developments needed to derive meaningful estimates from online genealogies.