Research Guides: Data: Find Data

Library Databases with Data

The Libraries subscribe to a number of databases, archives, and respositories that contain both summary statistics and raw datasets available for further analysis or integration with original data.

All Library-Licensed Statistics and Data Sets
A complete list of databases containing data licensed by the libraries.

A selection of frequently-used library resources for data include:

ICPSR This link opens in a new window
ICPSR is the preeminent data archive for research in the social and behavioral sciences. It contains more than 500,000 datasets with specialized collections in criminal justice, addiction, education, disability, demography, and more.
PolicyMap This link opens in a new window
PolicyMap captures data in visually powerful ways through custom demographic maps, tables, reports and an analysis tool, Analytics. Available data includes demographics, home sale statistics, health data, mortgage trends, school performance scores and labor data like unemployment, crime statistics and city crime rates.
ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States This link opens in a new window
The ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic conditions of the United States
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research - Datasets This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive collection of public opinion survey datasets. The focus of the collection is on surveys from the United States, although the collection also includes surveys from Europe, Latin America and Asia. The collection includes datasets dating back as far as 1936.
Social Explorer This link opens in a new window
Provides demographic information about the United States, from 1940 to 2000.

Data Catalogs

Datasets are often difficult or impossible to find through normal search engines. Specialized catalogs have been developed to aggregate the results from around the web.

When to use a data catalog? As a starting place if you are still trying to narrow down the topic you are interested in. Can also be helpful to find data repositories that allow for more specific searches.

Google Dataset Search
Google for datasets, which cannot be readily located through regular Google. Despite indexing millions of datasets, it is still not comprehensive!
DataCite Search
More than 12 million datasets from around the world that have been shared by researchers in institutional and subject-based data repositories.
DataONE
A federation of more than 40 data repositories in the environmental and earth sciences, containing over 800,000 datasets.
OpenAIRE
A pan-European infrastructure for discovering scholarly outputs, including datasets and articles.

Research Data Librarian

Kelsey Badger

she/her

Email Me

Contact:

490C 18th Ave Library

Schedule a consultation: https://library.osu.edu/research-data

Open Government Data

The federal government provides free public access to vast amounts of data produced through both government operations and government-funded research.

Data.gov
The home of the U.S. Government’s open data. Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more
Data.census.gov
Data.census.gov is the new platform to access demographic and economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Federal Statistical Agencies
There are 13 Principal Statistical Agencies in the U.S. government that are tasked with collecting and sharing statistics and data. Because they produce the majority of federal statistics, browsing the list of these agencies is a good starting point for locating government-produced data in an area of interest.
Federal Science Agencies
Since 2013, the federal agencies that fund large amounts of scientific research have been required to issue plans for how they will make the products of that research available to the public. Referencing these plans is a good starting point for finding the data repositories and catalogs an agency uses for dissemination of research data.