Research Guides: SSOR 490 Developing Professional Skills in Operations Research and Statistics: Data Sources

Where to find data

An Easy Way to Get Data

ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)
Archive of social science data for research and instruction. Includes data files for use with statistical software, such as SAS or SPSS. Many data files include extensive documentation, but some files, especially those stored outside ICPSR, are less well-maintained.

A Bit Harder but a Bigger Variety of Topics and Data Sources

Many of the governmental and non-governmental organizations that produce official statistics about a topic also release their data files for others to analyze in different ways, but not all do. Often these data files can be found under links labeled "data files," "for researchers," "source data," or similar terms. The links below give some examples of data download pages that were found this way.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Use Data Files
Some of the health-related data collected by the U.S. government, including data about immunizations, mortality, and health care. Many of these files also are available through ICPSR.
Virginia Department of Education Data for Researchers and Developers
Data from educational tests (SOLs), graduation rates, postsecondary enrollment and other topics from the Commonwealth of Virginia
Data USA Data Sources
A list of publicly-available data sources used to generate the maps and lists in Data USA
VCU Libraries Data and Statistics Guide
Links to organizations that produce official statistics. Some of them also include their data. You can use this guide to locate an organization and look at the organization's site to see if it provides data.

Search Engines for Data?

Because it can be hard to find data on the web, some specialized search engines have been created just to look for data files. They still are just getting started, so they do not yet have a lot of data that can be found through them.

Google Dataset Search Engine
Launched in September 2018, Google Dataset search currently includes data from select partners that provided metadata in the format Google requested. Use the "Free" button to locate datasets that are available without charege.