LibGuides: ECON 3063: Narrative Economics: Strategies for Searching for Data Sources

Questions to Ask Yourself When Looking for Data Sources

Who? Who might be interested in and able to collect the data you would like to find? That is, who might have an interest in the subject matter as well as the material support and expertise to conduct the data collection? Who might be required to make it publicly available? Who might be willing to share it voluntarily?
- Which of these data collectors do you think will provide you the data that you need at no cost?
  - Government agencies
  - Inter-governmental organizations
  - Non-governmental organizations/non-profit organizations
  - Academic researchers
  - Think tanks/policy institutes
  - Community organizations
  - For-profit companies
Who? Part two: Do you need nationally representative samples, or would smaller studies help you answer your question? Are you looking for data on certain segments of the population?
When? Are you looking for current or historical data? Historical data from the same organization might be stored in a different database or data repository than current data. Older data and statistics might be only available in print form.
Where? At what geographic level are you interested in studying - neighborhood, city, county, state, region, country, continent, world? What organizations or individuals might collect and share data at that geographic level?

Scan the Secondary Literature for Primary Sources

Follow the footnotes! Secondary sources can often lead you to citations for primary sources such as data sets.

You can search for secondary sources in Google Scholar or other scholarly article databases using your topic keywords.

Data Journals

What are data journals?

Data journals are academic publications that focus on the collection, description, and sharing of data rather than the original findings scholars draw from the data. These can be great places to search for potential datasets.

Some examples of data journals

Journal of Open Psychology Data (JOPD)
The Journal of Open Psychology Data (JOPD) features peer reviewed data papers describing psychology datasets with high reuse potential. Data papers may describe data from unpublished work, including replication research, or from papers published previously in a traditional journal.
Data in Brief
Data in Brief provides a way for researchers to easily share and reuse each other's datasets by publishing data articles that thoroughly describe data and make data easier to find. Data in Brief accepts submissions that describe data from all research areas.
Data Is Plural
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. You can read all DIP editions here and also explore the archive as a spreadsheet or as Markdown files.
Scientific Data
Scientific Data, a peer-reviewed, online-only, open-access publication, publishes datasets that might not normally get into the open and increases the discoverability and reusability of datasets. Data Descriptors, the primary article type, describe previously unpublished datasets and expand on previous publications.

Data Repositories

What are data repositories?

Data repositories host research and other data for long-term preservation and archiving. They may be hosted by universities/colleges, non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), etc. They might be broad in scope, or they might organized around a specific area of reseach.

Some examples of data repositories

re3data.org
re3data.org is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions.
Harvard Dataverse
Housed at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard. Claims to host the world's largest collection of social science research. It holds data from many researchers and institutions in addition to Harvard.
ICPSR: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
ICPSR is one of the largest repositories for social science data in the world. Among the many topics covered, you will find statistics on crime, education, demographics, elections, religion, and much more.

Open Data Portals

What are open data portals?

Some government entities make their data available to the public using open data portals.

How to find open data portal

You can search for these in your favorite internet search engine - try searching for the name of the place and "open data" or "open data portal".
Use the Global Open Data Index to find and evaluate how usable and transparent the data portal might be.
DataPortals.org claims to be the most comprehensive list of open data portals in the world. It is curated by a group of leading open data experts from around the world - including representatives from local, regional and national governments, international organisations such as the World Bank, and numerous NGOs.

Barriers to open data portals

Open Knowledge International notes three major environmental constraints that contribute to a lack of openness in government data sharing:

"1. Lack of capacity of government to maintain infrastructure and websites; incomplete and inaccessible published official information.
2. Limited open data knowledge from the respective government officials.
3. Limited capacity and open data knowledge of CSOs to take advantage or to ask for open data."

Some examples of open data portals