Librarian
Data, Datasets, and Statistical Resources
This Guide provides a sample of data sources you may consider for this course. For the full Data, Datasets, and Statistical Resources guide, click the link below.
Searching for Data
Because there can be so many false starts when searching for data, it is a good idea to establish a big picture for yourself. Answer these questions before you start searching and keep notes as you learn more as you go.
- What field(s) of study would be interested in this topic?
- What do I already know about the data or measures I'm looking for?
- What is likely to collect the data?
Think about whether there are government agencies or labs or other groups that would have an interest in this kind of data. - Who is likely to share datasets?
Universities, scholarly journals, government agencies, professional organizations are all possibilities.
There may be times where the topic you're interested in will not have any accessible data. Before you go too far down the road of committing to a topic, be sure that data options exist and are available to you.
Possible Next Steps in Data Searching
Assuming you have a general topic of interest, you might start looking for data in a number of ways. Here are a few examples.
- Brainstorm the data landscape of your topic. Go directly to the web sites of the places you identified in this process (hint: this is hard for beginners)
- Find a published article on your topic and see if mentions that the data are shared. Or, look up the authors' names and see if they have a web site where they share their data. Search data repositories for the name of the article to see if the datasets are shared there.
- Go to the web sites of government agencies the publish data of general interest to you. Look around at what is there and find some data you would be interested in exploring further.
- Go to a broad repository like Dryad or DataONE and search by simple keywords describing topics of interest to you. See what datasets are there that might be interesting to work with.
- If you want to use Google, in addition to keywords for the topic of interest, include the word data, and try advanced limiters like site:.edu or site:.gov to pull up only educational and government web sites (but remember that U.S. state government web site use different patterns like https://data.web.health.state.mn.us/).
Examples of Places to Search
In order from broad to narrow in scope
Topical Directory of Data Repositories
- re3data.org
This link opens in a new window
Search re3data by broad topic of data you are interested in. In class I'll use the example of ice. Discover small and large repositories and web sites that produce data, where you can search in more detail.
Multi-disciplinary Data Repositories
- Dryad Digital Repository
- This link opens in a new window
A repository of publicly available datasets associated with journal publications across all scientific disciplines.
Disciplinary Data Repositories
- DataONE SearchData Observation Network for Earth allows you to search across the repositories of 43 (and growing) organizations that produce environmental science data.
- EDI Data PortalThe Environmental Data Initiative is an example of a repository of well-documented environmental and ecological data. It is included in a DataONE search, but provides more search granularity. EDI is a NSF-funded project to make ecological data easier to find and re-use.
Regional Data Repositories
- Arctic Data CenterAn example of regional repository, an effort to pull together scientific research data about a region of the world.
Topical Data Collections & Guides
- Wildfires Data - NASANASA collects data used by people studying wildfire activity. This page points to multiple sources from NASA and other agencies on various aspects of wildfire monitoring.
- Data Toolkits - NASA Earth Science DataGuides to NASA data, based on most commonly used and requested data, laid out with explanatory text and helpful documentation.
