Find Data

Review academic literature, where many published studies generate and analyze data. Search for articles related to the population, problem, or methodology you are targeting. These articles should reference the data repositories, databases, or specific datasets used to conduct the research, and may detail where data has been deposited.

• Select data-specific search filters. For example, in PubMed, you can search articles with Associated Data by selecting this filter under Article Attributes in the sidebar. You can also select Dataset as an Article Type. If Dataset doesn't appear under Article Type in your sidebar, click Additional Filters button and add it.
• Browse articles for sections such as Supplementary Materials, Data Availability Statement, or Data Citations to find attached data files and links to external data. 
• Use data as a search term. For example, “nonalcoholic fatty liver disease AND data”.
• Enter your search terms in Yale Library's Books+ and then filter by format Data Sets.
• Search across all National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) resources to see many National Library of Medicine resources at once, including literature and databases.

Data repositories are storage locations for datasets and information about those datasets (such as metadata and documentation), and they are often themed by subject.

Tips for finding data repositories:

• Use a data repository registry, such as re3data.org and fairsharing.org.
• Find data repositories by funder, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
• Find data repositories by discipline, such as those recommended by Nature’s Scientific Data and PLoS ONE.
• Search generalist data repositories, such as Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Mendeley Data, Open Science Framework, Qualitative Data Repository (QDR), Synapse, Vivli, and Zenodo.
• Use a government data portal, such as data.gov and healthdata.gov.

Consider who might be creating the data you need for research. This includes governing bodies, academic and research institutions, biomedical companies, and not-for-profit organizations, as well as news organizations and other invested groups.

Examples of these include:

• World Health Organization’s data resources
• United Nations Refugee Agency data catalog
• Gapminder data (read more about Gapminder)
• New York Times’ COVID-19 data on Github (read more about this data)

Some academic journals focus on publishing data, and information about data science. Try searching one of the following: 

• Scientific Data: a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets and research that advances the sharing and reuse of scientific data.

• Data in Brief: a multidisciplinary, open access, peer-reviewed journal, publishing short articles that describe and provide access to research data.

• Journal of Open Psychology Data: features peer-reviewed data papers describing psychology datasets with high reuse potential.

• Open Health Data: features peer-reviewed data papers describing health datasets with high reuse potential.

• MDPI Data Journal: a peer-reviewed open access journal in data science, with the aim of enhancing data transparency and reusability. The journal publishes in two sections: a section on the collection, treatment and analysis methods of data in science; and a section that publishes descriptions of scientific and scholarly datasets.

• GigaScience: publishes all research objects from big data studies across the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences.