George Charles Alter
- Email George Charles Alter
- (734)764-4437
- CV (PDF)
- Google Scholar Profile
BIO
George Alter is Research Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research integrates theory and methods from demography, economics, and family history with historical sources to understand demographic behaviors in the past. From 2007 to 2016 Alter was Director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the world’s largest archive of social science data. He has been active in international efforts to promote research transparency, data sharing, and secure access to confidential research data, and he has worked on new metadata standards that improve the reusability and interoperability of research data. His current projects aim to automate the capture of metadata from statistical analysis software, describe Demographic Transitions around the world, and create a FAIR vocabulary of terms used in population research.
- George Charles Alter. 2025. The role of deaths following childbirth in sex differences in mortality. Population Studies
- Timothy McPhillips, Jack Gager, Thomas Thelen, George Charles Alter, Jeremy Iverson, Bertram Ludäscher, Dan Smith. 2025. Bridging the Gap Between Process and Procedural Provenance for Statistical Data. International Journal of Digital Curation 19(1)
- George Charles Alter, Michel Oris. 2025. Balancing economic stress: The role of rural-urban migration in nineteenth-century East Belgium. Explorations in Economic History :101666.
- George Charles Alter, Samuel H. Williamson. 2025. Pensions and household structure: Pennsylvania Railroad retirees in 1900, 1910, and 1920. The History of the Family 30(4):574-590.
- George Charles Alter, Hacker, J. David. 2024. The Impact of Multiple Births on Fertility: Stopping and Spacing in the United States During the Demographic Transition. Demography 61(5):1509-1533.
- Kees Mandemakers, George Charles Alter, Hélène Vézina, Paul Puschmann. 2023. Sowing: The Construction of Historical Longitudinal Population Databases.
- Alter, George Charles. 2019. The Evolution of Models in Historical Demography. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 50(3):325-362.
- Alter, George Charles, Song, Jie , Jagadish, H V. 2019. C2Metadata: Automating the Capture of Data Transformations from Statistical Scripts in Data Documentation. the 2019 International Conference :2005-2008.
- Alter, George Charles, Bengtsson, Tommy . 2019. Early-Life Conditions and Old-Age Mortality in a Comparative Perspective: Nineteenth Century Sweden and Belgium. Old and New Perspectives on Mortality Forecasting :335-349.
- Alter, George Charles, Chen, Xiaoling , Gururaj, Anupama E, Ozyurt, Burak , Liu, Ruiling , Soysal, Ergin , Cohen, Trevor , Tiryaki, Firat , Li, Yueling , Zong, Nansu , Jiang, Min , Rogith, Deevakar , Salimi, Mandana , Kim, Hyeon-eui , Rocca-Serra, Philippe , Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra , Farcas, Claudiu , Johnson, Todd , Margolis, Ron , Sansone, Susanna-Assunta , Fore, Ian M, Ohno-Machado, Lucila , Grethe, Jeffrey S, Xu, Hua . 2018. DataMed - an open source discovery index for finding biomedical datasets. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 25(3):300-308.