Searching for Data

The Data & Visualization Services department can assist you with finding data for your research project. Contact our faculty and staff for help with your data searches.

We can help you:

• Access and download large datasets such as American Community Survey and the General Social Survey.
• Find data housed in data repositories, such as ICPSR.
• House data in data repositories.
• Gain access to and use of data resources across disciplines.

For finding data houses in repositories, the best place to start is re3data.org, a search engine for research data repositories:

In addition, Nature.com has an article that lists scientific data repositories, with discipline-specific data sources as well as omnibus resources for finding data.

The University of Miami's Richter Library website has a databases section which contains access to several useful data sources.

Some of the databases include Statista, containing "85,000 diverse topics of data and facts from over 10,000 sources," SNL Kagan, which "provides media and communications business intelligence including data, news, and analysis on US and global markets for radio, television, motion pictures, and emerging technologies," Web of Science, and Scopus.

Data Sources

The ICPSR is one of the major sources of curated scientific and social scientific data.

 

figshare is a third-party privately run repository that hosts general research data and can assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to data.

 

Dryad is a non-profit repository that focuses on life sciences data but accepts general data.

 

Zenodo is a "catch-all" repository which accepts general data and promotes open science.

 

DataONE is a community driven project which provides access to earth and environmental science data.

 

Harvard Dataverse is part of the Dataverse project, a network of open-source repositories. It contains over 80,000 datasets.

 

ClinicalTrials.gov is a database of privately and publicly funded clinical studies conducted around the world.

 

Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a free and open source for biodiversity data.

 

The NCBI GenBank is the NIH genetic sequence database.