Discovering Data Sets - #ResearchProTips - Past Library Workshops

Research Data

re3data: Registry of Research Data Repositories
Searchable directory of data repositories. A good first step for investigating data sets in your research area.
DataCite
Search for data sets related to published research articles.
FigShare
Originally created for sharing images and figures; now hosts data files as well.
Nature: Recommended Data Repositories
A list of major data repositories. Focuses on biomedical and physical science, but also includes social sciences.
NIH Data Sharing Repositories
A listing of data repositories maintained by the National Institutes of Health.
ICPSR
Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. Contains data from large public studies as well as independent research groups.
Kaggle Datasets
Community-created structured data on a variety of topics, from social issues to sports to TV and games.

Data-Planet Statistical Datasets
A large collection of data sets from government and NGO sources, with built-in features for generating charts and graphs.

Sage Data This link opens in a new window
It features statistical data series created from more than 200,000 government and non-government data sets, covering popular topics of research interest for U.S. states, counties, cities, metropolitan areas, and ZIP codes. Datasets for 2017-21.

Data.gov
Portal to data provided by the US Federal Government.
Historical Statistics of the United States
Includes public data such as population, labor, education, etc. from colonial times to the late 20th century.

Repositories of open data

OPENN
OPenn contains complete sets of high-resolution archival images of cultural heritage material from the collections of its contributing institutions, along with machine-readable descriptive and technical metadata.
Project Gutenberg
53,000 free ebooks, many downloadable as .txt files. Heed their harvesting policies!
University of Oxford Text Archive
Notable mostly for the 61,000 documents for which the full text is made available through the Text Creation Partnership (TCP).
MSU Libraries' Datasets for Digital Research
A handful of textual datasets, some of which are available off-campus. Mostly historical textual data.

Repositories of Datasets

Datahub: GLAM datasets
Example of using Datahub to find datasets from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums .
Alan Liu's DH Toychest: Data Collections and Datasets
An overwhelming list of humanities and adjacent datasets, impressively curated by Alan Liu. (The site is worth poking around if you're curious about Digital Humanities.)

What folks do with humanities data...

Topics in PMLA
A visualization of a topic model for the Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1889-2007.
Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews
"This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com."
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
A social network visualization of relationships gleaned from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and curated by scholars of Early Modern England.