Open Access
When you see this orange open lock symbol, it means the resource (article, data, image, etc.) is free to read and free to re-use. Visit our Open Access site to learn more.
Where to Find Data: Tips
1st: define your topic, but be flexible if needed:
- Who or What? A population, organization, commodity, or thing you want to study
- When? Are you looking for a one-time study or over a period of time? Or are you looking for current information?
- Where? What geographical region interests you?
2nd: know where to look:
- Check out data repositories/archives (links to another guide). There are large, general places to find a variety of datasets or subject-specific repositories.
- Perhaps you can be more specific, like identifying a specific organization, institution, or government agency that produces data on your topic. This will take some creative thinking, but could lead you to awesome results.
- Next stop is to look in the professional literature. Often you will find references to statistics and data in the literature. This is a clue that will lead you to the actual resource for the data.
Recorded webinar on understanding the new (2020) Census Data. Census data can be found in several of the data-finding tools linked below.
Resources for Finding Data & Statistics
- The almanac of American politicsIncludes profiles of elected officials including biographical information, voting records, campaign expenditures, interest-group ratings. Also contains overviews and demographic data from states and House districts.
- CountryWatchIncludes basic information on each country, constantly updated news stories, links to official websites, etc. Topics include government, economy, investment climate, and social and environmental issues. Also includes maps, downloadable data tables, country forecasts, and other information.
- SAGE Data (formerly Data Planet)
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Data-Planet Statistical Datasets provides easy access to an extensive repository of standardized and structured statistical data. The Data-Planet repository contains more than 18.9 billion data points from more than 70 source organizations. The over 3.9 billion time series in Data-Planet provide immediate access to data presented in charts, maps, graphs, and table form, via multiple points of entry. - Historical Statistics of the United StatesCompilation of historical statistics for the United States.
- SAGE statsThis resource is available through OhioLink and has a variety of local, state, political, and business statistics and datasets for you to explore.
- Simmons OneView
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Contains data on US adult consumers, including demographic information, products and brands used, income and education levels, media consumed and psychographic/behavioral characteristics. - SimplyAnalytics
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SimplyMap provides demographic, business, or marketing data from the state down to the local level, allowing users to create customized maps and reports with an almost unlimited number of variables. - SociometricsA searchable collection of data from more than 285 social science studies. The data is organized into 9 major research areas focused on health and social policy areas.
- Statista
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Statista is an excellent source of business, economic, political, social, and historical statistics. It is a great place to simply search for your topic to find loads of relevant and useful statistics and infographics.
- Amazon Web Sevices Public Data
Amazon Web Services hosts a variety of public data sets that anyone can access for free, topics: satellite imagery, NEXRAD, human genome project, etc. - Annual Disability Statistics CompendiumThe Annual Disability Statistics Compendium is a publication of statistics about people with disabilities and about the government programs which serve them. It is modeled after the Statistical Abstracts of the United States, published yearly by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Compendium is designed to serve as a summary of government statistics.
- County Health Rankings & RoadmapsThe annual County Health Rankings measure vital health factors, including high school graduation rates, obesity, smoking, unemployment, access to healthy foods, the quality of air and water, income, and teen births in nearly every county in America. The annual Rankings provide a revealing snapshot of how health is influenced by where we live, learn, work and play. They provide a starting point for change in communities.
- data.worldFree to join and access to diverse, international datasets in a variety of formats.
- DataCiteDataCite is a leading global non-profit organisation that provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for research data and other research outputs.
- Europa World PlusProvides economic, political and geographic background information and statistical data by country, and includes thousands of directory contact details with click-through web links and a comprehensive listing of some 1,900 international organizations.
- European Data PortalSearching datasets: Categories have been established to structure the metadata harvested from the various countries.
Providing Data: This section gives an insight into understanding Open Data from the perspective of a data provider. In addition, instructions are offered for those who wish their data portal to be harvested by the European Data Portal.
Using Data: How Open Data is being used, as well as the economic benefits of Open Data are detailed in this section.
Training and Library: eLearning modules about Open Data as well as training guides and a knowledge base referencing publications around Open Data and featured projects. - FigShareA free cloud-based service for researchers to upload their data for discovery and access
- ICPSRThe Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research maintains the world's largest archive of computerized, numeric social science data. Topics include demography, economics, health care, politics, social behavior, public opinion. OU does not subscribe, but many data sets are open access.
- IPUMSIPUMS provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts. Data and services available free of charge.
- Laborsta InternetLabor statistics for over 200 countries or territories from the International Labour Office. Yearly data of total and economically active population, Employment, Unemployment, Hours of Work, Wages, Labor Cost, Consumer Price Indices, Occupational Injuries, Strikes and Lockouts.
- Master List for Open Access Data RepositoriesSearch by field
- Open Access Data RepositoriesThis is a list of repositories and databases for open data.
- Open Science Framework (OSF)Find open data, projects, materials, collaborators. More than just a data repository, an open project management platform
- Polling the Nationsof public opinion polls containing the full text of 600,000+ questions and responses, from 18,000+ surveys and 1,700+ polling organizations, conducted from 1986 through the present in the United States and more than 100 other countries around the world.
- Re3data.orgSuper multidisciplinary list of data repositories- Register of Research Data Repositories
- Scientific DataScientific Data is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for descriptions of research datasets.
- Social Science Electronic Data LibraryA premium health and social science resource consisting of over 600 datasets that are organized topically-focused collections and each was selected for inclusion by a National Advisory Panel of experts. Resource includes: American family data, child well-being, aging, maternal drug abuse, etc.
- UNdataProvides a single entry-point to over 60 million data points covering a wide range of themes including agriculture, crime, education, employment, energy, environment, health, HIV/AIDS, human development, industry, information and communication technology, national accounts, population, refugees, tourism, trade, as well as the Millennium Development Goals indicators.
- World Bank DataProvides stats & data on a wide range of development-related topics such as population, environment, economy, health, and education. Covers over 200 countries and over 500 data series. Data can be scaled, indexed against a particular year, viewed by percentage change and charted. Make sure to check out the WDR Reports!
- Explore Census DataFind popular facts (population, income, etc.) and frequently requested data about your community.
- Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)BEA's interactive data application is the one stop shop for accessing BEA data on the fly. BEA updates its data in near real time and sorted by account, topic, and regional.
- Bureau of Labor StatisticsFrom economic indicators to labor trends including: Consumer Price Index, Current Population Survey (employment, unemployment, earnings), Employment Cost Trends, Local Area Unemployment and Producer Price Index.
- Census ExplorerMake new discoveries about your neighborhood with Census Explorer, the U.S. Census Bureau’s interactive map series.
- County Health Rankings & RoadmapsSearch by county/state OR health behaviors/care/socioeconomic factors
- DATA.govU.S. Government’s OPEN data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more! Topics: business, climate, ocean, health, government, etc.
- Easy StatsAccess to selected statistics collected by the U.S. Census Bureau through the American Community Survey, including detailed demographic and economic statistics. Decommissioned 30 September 2016, per https://www.census.gov/data/data-tools/decommissioned.html
- EnviroMapperWelcome to EnviroMapper for Envirofacts, a single point of access to select U.S. EPA environmental data. This Web site provides access to several EPA databases to provide you with information about environmental activities that may affect air, water, and land anywhere in the United States. With Envirofacts, you can learn more about these environmental activities in your area or you can generate maps of environmental information.
- Environmental Dataset GatewayFind data easily. Connecting EPA's Environmental Resources.
- Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)Download, graph, and track U.S. and international economic data from 80 different sources all in one.
- FedStatsFedStats supports a community of practice for over 100 agencies engaged in the production and dissemination of official federal statistics, and provides the public with a showcase of information, tools and news related to official federal statistics.
- National Center of Education StatisticsThe National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.
- National Institute of Health (NIH) Data Sharing RepositoryThis table lists NIH-supported data repositories that make data accessible for reuse.
- U.S. Census BureauLinks to a broad range of statistics & data you can select by topic or geography including: demographics, business, and international data - Infographics and interactive data tools.
- AILLA: Archive of the indigenous languages of Latin AmericaAILLA is a digital archive of recordings and texts in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. Access to archive resources is free of charge. Most of the resources in the AILLA database are available to the public, but some have special access restrictions.
- ComparaLexComparaLex is an online lexical database developed by the Canada Institute of Linguistics. The database stores language word list data including audio samples and makes them available for linguistic analysis and historical and comparative linguistic reconstruction.
- LAUDATIO: Long-term Access and Usage of Deeply Annotated InformationAn open access research data repository for historical corpora.
- OLAC: Open Language Archives CommunityOLAC is "an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources."
- ORTOLANG: Open Resources and TOols for LANGuageIncludes a repository of language data (corpora, lexicons, dictionaries, etc.) and readily available, well-documented tools for its processing.
- Qualitative Data RepositoryQDR selects, ingests, curates, archives, manages, durably preserves, and provides access to digital data used in qualitative and multi-method social inquiry.
- The Rosetta ProjectThe Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of material on the nearly 7,000 known human languages. The collection currently contains nearly 100,000 pages of material documenting over 2,500 languages, as well as a growing multimedia collection of modern and historical language recordings.
- SIL International Language & Culture ArchivesContains works collected, compiled, or created by SIL, its strategic partners, or members of ethnolinguistic minority communities. Search and browse over 40,000 resources dating from 1935 to the present that describe, document, and/or communicate in the languages and cultures SIL serves.
- TROLLing - The Tromsø Repository of Language and LinguisticsTROLLing "is designed as an archive of linguistic data and statistical code. The archive is open access, which means that all information is available to to everyone. All postings are accompanied by searchable metadata that identify the researchers, the languages and linguistic phenomena involved, the statistical methods applied, and scholarly publications based on the data (where relevant). Linguists worldwide are invited to post datasets and statistical models used in linguistic research."
- UK Data ServiceThe UK Data Service collection includes major UK government-sponsored surveys, cross-national surveys, longitudinal studies, UK census data, international aggregate, business data, and qualitative data.
- Data Informatics Program- CE3 Data TeamThe CE3 Data Team regularly creates interactive maps and data visualizations to enhance the presentation information collected and analyzed for applied research projects. Using a combination of geographic information system (GIS) and web applications, the Voinovich School’s GIS, database, and web development units collaborate to create user-friendly, interactive maps that help our clients answer questions about natural resources, infrastructure, business strategy and land use and make decisions using a variety of analysis techniques and data from many different sources.
- Student DataOU student enrollment, graduation rates, etc.
- Survey & Data ServicesThe Voinovich School provides a full range of survey research assistance. Our services include: sampling plans, instrument design, implementation support, and data analysis.
- University DataHistorical information about OU, fact book, space and room data, etc.
- OHIO Diversity DashboardFrom OHIO's Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics