LibGuides: Data Sources: Home

Social Explorer

Social Explorer provides quick and easy access to current and historical census data and demographic information. The interface lets users create maps and reports to illustrate, analyze, and understand demography and social change.

Contents include:

The entire US Census from 1790 to 2010.
The entire American Community Survey (ACS) from 2005 to 2014.
All annual updates from the American Community Survey.
InfoGroup data on religious congregations in the United States for 2009 and 2010, including maps for counties and special census areas, as well as point maps of the actual congregation locations.
The Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS) from 1980 to 2010.
Carbon Emissions Data for 2002 from the Vulcan Project.

Accessing Social Explorer

Memorial Library provides full access to Social Explorer. Sign up for an individual account while connected to the campus network, then access the database anywhere. If you don't see the banner and green flag in the top right indicating that the Professional Edition is provided by Berry College, make sure you are logged into the Berry network. Once you have an account, log in and start building!

Social Explorer Guide

Social Explorer This link opens in a new window Visually explore demographic information, from census and economic data to election and religion data, and more.
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Users can visually explore change over time and understand the patterns behind the raw numbers. For full functionality, Berry students, faculty & staff sign up for an individual account while connected to the Berry network.

ProQuest Statistical Insight

Powerful search engine to pinpoint association, governmental and other published data sources. Some data is available to download directly from the site in Excel or PDF format or as tables in GIF format. Contains U.S. federal, regional and international sources.

Statistical Insight This link opens in a new window Definitive compilation of statistical information from U.S. federal and state governments, businesses, and international publications.
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Open Data Portals

Some government entities make their data available to the public using open data portals. These portals may contain geospatial data sets to download. Search for these in your favorite internet search engine - try searching for the name of the place and "open data" or "open data portal".

Global Open Data Index
Use the Global Open Data Index to find and evaluate how usable and transparent the data portal might be.
DataPortals.org
Claims to be the most comprehensive list of open data portals in the world. It is curated by a group of leading open data experts from around the world - including representatives from local, regional and national governments, international organisations such as the World Bank, and numerous NGOs.

Examples of Open Data Portals

Data.gov The stated purpose of DATA.GOV is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the U.S. Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets.
EU Open Data Portal
openAFRICA

Data Repositories

Data repositories host research and other data for long-term preservation and archiving. They may be hosted by universities/colleges, non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), etc. They might be broad in scope, or they might organized around a specific area of reseach.

Global Biodiversity Information Facility
An international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments and aimed at providing open access to data about all types of life on Earth.
Google Dataset Search
References to most datasets in environmental and social sciences, as well as data from other disciplines including government data and data provided by news organizations, such as ProPublica.
Harvard Dataverse
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.
Open Access Directory of Data Repositories
Maintains lists of open access data repositories for a wide range of subject areas.
Re3Data.org: Registry of Research Data Depositories
Identify and locate online repositories of research data. Users and bibliographers create and curate records that describe data repositories that users can search. Hundreds of data sources are cataloged in this resource.

Selected Humanities Data Sources

National Endowment for the Humanities
As part of their Open Access mandate, NEH provides the high-value datasets in XML format. These datasets may also be found on the Data.gov portal.
WordSeer Project
A text analysis environment that combines visualization, information retrieval, sensemaking and and natural language processing to make the contents of text navigable, accessible, and useful.

Selected Science Data Sources

Healthdata.Gov
U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services has begun "liberating" health data through the Health Data Initiative -- making more and more data from HHS' vaults (from CMS, CDC, FDA and NIH, to name a few sources) easily available and accessible to the public and to innovators across the country.
NASA's Global Change Master Directory
The Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) is a directory to Earth science data and services. The GCMD database currently holds more than 25,000 Earth science data sets and services covering all aspects of Earth and environmental sciences.
Open Energy Info
Open Energy Information (OpenEI) is a knowledge sharing online community dedicated to connecting people with the latest energy information and data. More than 800 data sets available.

Selected Social Science Data Sources

Census.gov
Data from the Census Bureau about the people and economy of the U.S.
World Bank Data Catalog
Download access to over 8,000 indicators from World Bank data sets.
World Historical Dataverse
intended to the contribute to creation of a comprehensive set of data on social-scientific, health, and environmental data for the world as a whole and for its constituent regions and localities, for the past four or five centuries.

Data Journals

Data journals are scholarly journals that publish datasets or data papers. According to Geoscience Data Journal, "a data paper describes a dataset, giving details of its collection, processing, software, file formats etc, without the requirement of novel analyses or ground breaking conclusions. It allows the reader to understand the when, how and why data was collected and what the data-product is."

Biodiversity Data Journal A community peer-reviewed, open access journal, designed to accelerate publishing, dissemination and sharing of biodiversity-related data of any kind.
Data in Brief Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, which publishes short articles that describe and provide access to research data.
GigaScience Aims to "revolutionize publishing by promoting reproducibility of analyses and data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use. As an open access and open-data journal, we publish ALL research objects (data, software tools and workflows) from 'big data' studies across the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences."
Journal of Open Psychology Data Peer reviewed data papers describing psychology datasets with high reuse potential. Data papers may describe data from unpublished work, including replication research, or from papers published previously in a traditional journal.
Journal of Open Public Health Data Peer reviewed data papers which provide a concise description of a moderated or open access dataset and where to find it.
Scientific Data A peer-reviewed, open-access journal for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets, and research that advances the sharing and reuse of scientific data.

Data Sources

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