LibGuides: Statistics: Data Sets

Finding Data Sets

Although there are an increasing number of public repositories where you can find data sets, you'll need to be creative and persistent. The best place to start is by asking your professor about data sets. They might have insight into disciplinary resources and can help you shape your inquiry. You're also always welcome to consult with a librarian.

There are also a lot of other library guides out there with lists of publicly available data sets, so even googling "publicly available data sets" or just "data sets" will give you some options. You'll find either other library guides or some data sets themselves.

Publicly Available Data Sets

Here are a few places to start. Be sure to talk with your professor, too, as there are a number of subject-specific data set repositories out there but which are not listed on this guide.

Data.gov
This is the US government's publicly available data. You'll find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
Google Dataset Search
Let Google do the searching for you. This search interface only searches data. You'll find a mixture of publicly available data but also some fee-based sets.
re3data.org
Re3data is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It includes repositories that enable permanent storage of and access to data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers, and scholarly institutions.
Dataverse
The Harvard Dataverse Repository is a free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, both inside and outside of the Harvard community, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data. Each individual Dataverse collection is a customizable collection of datasets (or a virtual repository) for organizing, managing, and showcasing datasets.