Find Data

There is a range of places to search for existing data that may be suitable to use in your research. It can save time to reuse a dataset, especially where data is expensive to collect, or where comparison datasets are part of your research project.

Sources include data shared through government data-sharing programs, data that requires meditated access or open data published from previous studies.

Types of data sources

There are a number of different sources of published data available to researchers:

  • Government websites or national programs
  • Data catalogues and data directories
  • Library databases, accessible by searching the collection
  • Subject or discipline-based repositories or archives
  • Institutional repositories, such as Bridges
  • University websites, research centres or research group websites
  • Internet search engines, e.g. Google or Google Scholar

How to search for data

It’s important to define the research area you need before you start searching. This allows you to focus your search and not waste time looking at sources you don’t need.

  • Define your topic and research question: Before you get into finding the data you need, make sure you’re clear on what you’re looking for.
  • Unit of analysis: Who or what are you studying? Be clear what individuals, groups, organisations, countries etc. you are focusing on.
  • Location: Make sure you know what geographic area you are focusing on whether that’s at a town, city, state or country level of specificity.
  • Timeframe: Know what time span the data is for. It could be current data, historical data or set period.

Evaluating data

Like all research sources, it’s important to assess the quality of the data you may draw on. Considerations include:

  • Audience: Understand why the data was produced – and who for
  • Credibility: Check the credibility of the author
  • Accuracy: Review data collection methods
  • Timeliness: Consider when the data was published and when it was collected

Data journals

Data journals publish brief articles that describe datasets. They are often open access and peer-reviewed, and the articles can be cited.

Examples include:

  • Scientific data
    Open-access, peer-reviewed publication for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets. Primary article-type is the Data Descriptor, designed to make data more discoverable, interpretable and reusable.
  • Geoscience data journal
    Publishes short data papers cross-linked to, and citing, datasets that have been deposited in approved data centres.
  • Journal of open archaeology data
    Peer reviewed data papers, describing archaeology datasets with high reuse potential.
  • GigaScience
    Open-access open-data journal. Publishes 'big-data' studies from life and biomedical sciences.

A number of data journals also support altmetrics that track non-traditional research indicators such as:

  • number of data views,
  • number of downloads,
  • social media 'likes' and recommendations.

These can be early indicators of the impact of data, before the long tail of formal citation metrics can be assessed.

Citing research data

Always cite data to credit the original author or producer and to help other researchers locate the material.

Refer to our citing and referencing guides – they provide information on each style. Some guides provide specific examples on how to cite data sets.