Finding Data: Dataset Sources

Use this page's Table of Contents to skip to an area of interest:

• VTechData
• Data Repository Directories
• Dataset Catalogs
• Multiple Topic Data Repositories
• Topical Data Repositories
  • Arts and Humanities
  • Sciences
  • Social Sciences

Questions about data?

Contact Data Services at the library: dataservices@vt.edu

VTechData: a platform for openly publishing datasets or other research products created by Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students. 

Re3data.org: a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. re3data.org promotes a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data. The registry went live in autumn 2012 and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

OpenDOAR: an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories (some will include datasets, but will also have many other information formats, such as articles, white papers, and more). Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.

SHARE: SHARE is a higher education initiative whose mission is to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely discoverable, accessible, and reusable. This link sets SHARE to find records of research datasets only.

Data.gov: home of the U.S. Government’s open data. Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more. 

NADAC: National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture - Free and easy access to data on the arts and on the arts' value and impact for individuals and communities

DataONE: a community driven project providing access to data across multiple member repositories, supporting enhanced search and discovery of Earth and environmental data. 

Dryad: a nonprofit repository for data underlying the international scientific and medical literature.

NIH Data Sharing Repositories: National Institute of Health-supported data repositories that make data accessible for reuse. Most accept submissions of appropriate data from NIH-funded investigators (and others), but some restrict data submission to only those researchers involved in a specific research network. Also included are resources that aggregate information about biomedical data and information sharing systems.

ICPSR: an international consortium of more than 700 academic institutions and research organizations, ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.

• Information about ICPSR including downloading datasets