Census Publications Status

See which Census Bureau publications have been removed from the web.

Currently covers:

• Working papers, America Counts stories, publications (reports, briefs, etc.)
• Published 2018 to 2025 YTD¹

Overview

1. Via the Wayback CDX server, compile lists (in data/urls/) of all webpages with the following prefixes that were ever snapshotted by the Internet Archive:
   • census.gov/library/working-papers/{year}/
   • census.gov/library/stories/{year}/
   • census.gov/library/publications/{year}/
2. Find the current HTML status code of each webpage (in data/status).
3. Make a list of removed webpages (data/removed_cen_pubs.csv).

For each removed webpage, I manually navigated to the Wayback snapshot to find the publication title. I also performed Google searches for select publications to see if they had been moved elsewhere on the Census website. I manually inserted this info into data/removed_cen_pubs.xlsx.

Limitations

• False positives and negatives
  • Includes webpages that were removed or relocated for benign reasons and/or prior to January 2025
  • Omits webpages that were never snapshotted by the Internet Archive
• Presumably, as new webpages go up and more webpages are taken down, it will be desirable to regenerate the URL lists and re-check statuses, but the code is not optimized for this
• Finding publication titles is not automated

Footnotes

1. Based on URL structure; for example "census.gov/library/working-papers/2025/". Actual publish date may differ. ↩