LibGuides: Data Visualization: Data Sources

Finding Data

"Data, data, data. I can not make bricks without clay." -Sherlock Holmes

Data plays a key role in our lives, especially as academics and professionals. Below are some places to find data in various subject areas.

American Fact Finder
Run by Census.gov, this is a much more user friendly site to finding statistics, rather than datasets.
US Census
Main US census website. Here, you can download datasets.
General Social Survey
The General Social Survey (GSS) conducts basic scientific research on the structure and development of American society with a data-collection program designed to both monitor societal change within the United States and to compare the United States to other nations.
Pew Research Center
The Pew Research Center runs the American Life Project and makes their data sets freely available for use.

ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Largest archive of political and social research data with over 500,000 datafiles. Includes specialized data collections in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.
dataZoa This link opens in a new window
Grab data from over 3 billion time series on economics, banking, finance, demographics, health, child well-being, environment, agriculture, energy & more. Data provided in a standardized format in your personal account. Results update automatically from the primary source and data can be used to build graphs, charts, and tables. Data can also easily be embedded in a website or blog.

Note: Provided by the Wichita State University Center for Economic Development.
Note: Create an account using your Wichita State University email address.

Data.gov
Centralized repository for US government data.
DataUSA
The most comprehensive set of visualized data dealing with the United States, courtesy of MIT.
Science.gov
Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2200 selected websites from 15 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics
Website providing data on a variety of statistics kept and recorded by the U.S. Department of Labor, including unemployment.
NASA Data
Data sets from NASA that pertain to Earth, the Moon, other planets, and space.

CIA World Factbook
The Central Intelligence Agency maintains a database that provides up-to-date information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military and transnational issues for 267 world entities.
UN Data
Datasets collected by the United Nations on a variety of topics.
Eurostat
Statistics collected by the European Union on member states, covering a variety of topics.
OECD Library
Datasets collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Data.gov.uk
The central clearinghouse for public data collected by the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Health Services Research Information Central
This site links to a wide variety of other reputable sites with data sets in the medical field.
CDC - Faststats
The quick version for statistics, but not necessarily quick access to data sets regarding healthcare.
SEER -Cancer Statistics
SEER is the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program from the National Cancer Institute. Data sets are available.

World Bank Data Catalog
The World Bank collects information on a variety of topics about nations around the world.
IMF Data
The International Monetary Fund publishes a range of time series data on IMF lending, exchange rates and other economic and financial indicators.
FRED II, Economic and Financial Data
From the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis
Bureau of Economic Analysis

When you have a few files or a dataset or two, it's not that big of a deal. When you've got years of materials or 200 PDFs of articles you need to read for a major project, then managing your data is a very big deal. There are a lot of ways to manage your data. The sites below offer a couple of options.

Mendeley
Mendeley is a free, social, file manager. You can do citation, hook it to Word, make a project group and share it with others, mark up PDFs, make notes, tag, and a lot more.

EndNote - Citation Management Software
by Samuel Willis Last Updated Oct 30, 2024 1187 views this year

The above link to Endnote will take you to the Ablah Library Endnote guide. WSU pays for a license for Endnote. Endnote has a bit of a learning curve and is somewhat similar to Mendeley. Endnote will allow you to hook up to Word for doing citations, search multiple databases, take notes, tag, etc.

Zotero
Zotero is another citation/file manager that is hooked more securely to the internet. It's an add-on to Firefox, but can also standalone too. It has collaborative aspects, tagging, note taking, and citation, among other things.

L - Lots

O - Of

C - Copies

K - Keep

S - Stuff

S - Safe

LOCKSS is a core principal in making sure your data doesn't disappear. The rule of thumb is that you want to back up your data often and in more than one place. Geographic diversity is best. While there has been an iCloud breakin, unless your data is sensitive, putting data into a cloud service still isn't a bad way to go.

DropBox
Cloud Storage. Set up a free account and share files back and forth between people through a shared folder. Version control and naming conventions are a must when using this tool.
Google Drive
GDrive, as it is more commonly known, contains a wide variety of tools including word processing, spreadsheets, and making presentations. The real value in GDrive though is the ability to not only create files that can be shared and edited in real time, but also to upload files of different formats into shared folders.
How to set up RAID on your PC
This is an article that goes in-depth on how to set up a secondary hard drive that automatically backs up your primary hard drive. This is for advanced computer users!
Box
Cloud Storage. Very similar to DropBox. Interface is different and there are some different options for use.