Today’s LYD post is by Don P. Jason III, MLIS, MS, Clinical Informationist based at the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library.
Welcome to Day 4 of “Love Your Data Week!” Whether you’re a student analyzing a data set for a school project or a researcher combining data sets to create new insights, finding the right data is essential! This blog post will list a few places you can look to find free, authoritative and unique data sets. The data sets have be broken down into three categories: US Government Data Sets, International Data Sets and Google Data Sets.
US Government Data Sets
Data.gov http://data.gov – This web site has an eclectic mix of datasets from criminal justice to climate data. This government site encourages people to use the data to create web and mobile applications and design data visualizations.
US Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/data.html – This web site provides data on the US population and economy. Utilizing this site’s data has never been easier thanks to new: API’s, data visualizations, mobile apps and interactive web apps.
Healthdata.gov https://www.healthdata.gov/ – This web site includes US healthcare data. The site is dedicated to making high value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers and policy makers.
National Climatic Data Center http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/quick-links#loc-clim – This is the world’s largest archive of weather data. It has a robust collection of environmental, meteorological and climate data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center.
International Data Sets
The CIA World Factbook https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ – This resource contains Information on history, population, economy, government, infrastructure and military for over 200 countries around the world.
European Union Open Data Portal http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/ – This data portal contains data from European Union institutions. The data covers subjects such as: science, employment, social questions, environment, economics, finance, trade and technology.
Data.gov.uk http://data.gov.uk/ – This web site houses data from the UK Government. The data covers subjects such as: Business, Crime and Justice, Defense, Education, Environment, Government, Health, Mapping, Society, Housing and Transportation.
Canada Open Data http://open.canada.ca/en – This is a pilot project with many government and geospatial datasets. It covers topics such as: Nature and Environment, Agriculture, Economic and Industry, Maps, and Health and Safety. The site even features apps that were created using the data sets.
NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre http://www.hscic.gov.uk/home – This site features Health data sets from the UK National Health Service. It includes topics such as: Hospital Care, IT infrastructure, Mental Health, Prescribing, Primary Care, Public Health, Social Work and Standards. You can even specify information type. These information types include: Official Statistics, Audits, Open Data, and Surveys.
UNICEF https://data.unicef.org/ – This site reports statistics on the situation of women and children worldwide. The site contains data available from over 190 countries and territories.
World Health Organization http://www.who.int/en/ – This site offers data on: world hunger, health, and disease statistics. These statistics are collected on 1,000 different indicators for WHO’s 194 member states.
Google Data Sets:
Google Finance https://www.google.com/finance – This web site has stock market data, updated in real time.
Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends/explore – This web site provides statistics on key word search trends for the Google search engine.
Google Books Ngrams http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html – This site allows you to search and analyze the full text of any of the books digitized as part of the Google Books project.
Google Public Data Explorer http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory – This is a directory of freely available public data sets.
Hopefully this list of data sets will give you a jumpstart on your research. Feel free to reach out to one of UC Libraries’ knowledgeable librarians or informationists if you need assistance finding a data set for your research.