The CIS emerged in 2003 from a project by Brasilio Sallum Jr., and sought to provide the social sciences academic community with a database sharing system for researchers to share information acquired during their investigations. The inspiration for the initiative came from a similar service used in the United States since the 1960s: the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) of the University of Michigan. The idea for creating an information sharing system relied on the material and institutional support from the USP Provost's Office for Research.

The Center for Rural and Urban Studies (CERU) develops interdisciplinary research, organizes meetings of scholars from the many different areas of the social sciences, and provides training to undergraduate and graduate students in the social sciences. The Center was founded in 1964 by a group of professors from the FFLCH Department of Social Sciences. In its inception, the Center focused on rural research and was then called the Center for Rural Studies.