Citation Guidelines & Conditions

The Canadian Human Mortality Database (CHMD) is provided free of charge. Users are asked to read carefully the following conditions.

It is the responsibility of all registered users of the CHMD to give proper credit to the institutions and/or individuals who have created the data being provided or transmitted here. Proper citation is necessary whether the data in question are quoted in formal publications or in any other context. The following comments are intended to assist users by providing information about CHMD data sources and by offering suggestions for appropriate citation procedures.

If you are using original exposure-to-risk, death rates, life tables, or life expectancy at birth data, we suggest the following format for a bibliographic citation:

Canadian Human Mortality Database. Department of Demography, Université de Montréal (Canada). Available at www.demo.umontreal.ca/chmd/ (data downloaded on [date]).

If you select another citation format, please make sure that it includes the full name of the database (Canadian Human Mortality Database), the full names of the institutional sponsor (Department of Demography, University of Montreal), and the Internet address, (www.demo.umontreal.ca/chmd/).

Data available on the CHMD may be provided by external sources, such as Statistics Canada or the Institut de la statistique du Québec. For deaths data, it is possible to determine whether a number comes from an external source or was created expressly for the CHMD by observing its decimal part: whole numbers usually indicate that a number is taken from some other source, whereas a non-zero fraction (i.e., anything other than "00" after the decimal point) is a sign that the number is a product of the CHMD itself. As for birth counts, they always come from an external source, and the CHMD is fully transmitting the information to the user.

In situations where data come from external sources, the user should identify and cite the original source, merely acknowledging the CHMD as the intermediary.

If you still have questions or comments about citation procedures after reading the guidelines, please do not hesitate to contact us at: nadine.ouellette@umontreal.ca.

Users are also asked not to distribute downloaded data to other individuals. Instead, refer them to the CHMD web site, where they can download the data by themselves. Since the database is updated on a regular basis, this practice will favour the acquisition of up-to-date data. It will also ensure that each user has complete access to information regarding the data, citation guidelines, etc.

CHMD data for each Canadian province and territory have received significant individualized attention in order to assure a high level of data quality. We have been very careful in assembling and manipulating the data presented here and we would appreciate your help in identifying and reporting any inaccuracies. The members of the CHMD research team, as well as the institutional sponsors, accept no liability in regard to the material available in the collection. In particular, we do not accept responsibility for any inconvenience that may result in using these data, even if such inconvenience is caused by our own error.

We intend to update the CHMD on a regular basis and to provide convenient access to the data via the Internet. However, we do not accept responsibility for any inconvenience that may result from a temporary or permanent suspension of service.

NOTE: The text above has been adapted from the Human Mortality Database web site (www.mortality.org).