The following sites contain downloadable data sets for analysis by subject area. Some of the sites are available for data set deposit, check with the Data Literacy Librarian if you are looking to find a repository to deposit your research data.
Contains over 1,000 books, reference works and journal articles by academics from across the social sciences. Also, includes over 500 specially authored cases that illustrate how real academic research projects were conducted and a collection of teaching datasets and instructional guides for students to develop data analysis skills.
Child Care & Early Education Research Connections, launched in 2004, promotes high quality research in child care and early education and the use of that research in policy making.
If you have statistical skills, you may enjoy doing online analysis of this major data set, which allow you to track trends 1972-2006. It is available through ICPSR through a paid DePaul subscription, but you must set up a free account. Scroll down to "Analyze data using SDA" to get started.
The National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN) promotes secondary analysis of child abuse and neglect data by providing researchers with high quality datasets, documentation and technical support, and encourages collaboration within the scientific community.
A wealth of shared data are available for use in psychological science research. These data span a wide variety of topics. This site contains examples of electronically available behavioral and social science data.
Climate Data Online (CDO) provides free access to NCDC's archive of global historical weather and climate data in addition to station history information. These data include quality controlled daily, monthly, seasonal, and yearly measurements of temperature, precipitation, wind, and degree days as well as radar data and 30-year Climate Normals.
The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of datatypes.
DataONE is a community driven project providing access to data across multiple member repositories, supporting enhanced search and discovery of Earth and environmental data.
GenBank ® is the NIH genetic sequence database, an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences. A GenBank release occurs every two months and is available from the ftp site.
Phenology data are already supporting science and helping natural resource managers and public officials make decisions about how to prepare for and cope with the rapid changes occurring across the nation.
A freely accessible collection of data relating to biologically-active small molecules, including compound structure, synonyms, descriptions, and bio-activity. Provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Access note: Freely available to the public.
VertNet is a NSF-funded collaborative project that makes biodiversity data free and available on the web. VertNet is a tool designed to help people discover, capture, and publish biodiversity data. It is also the core of a collaboration between hundreds of biocollections that contribute biodiversity data and work together to improve it.
IPUMS Terra integrates population and environmental data across disciplinary scientific domains, enabling research into dramatic transformations of human populations, the environment, and their interactions.
DataRefuge helps to build refuge for federal data and supports climate and environmental research and advocacy. We are committed to fact-based arguments. DataRefuge preserves the facts we need at a time of ongoing climate change.
Users have the ability to create and analyze worksets by assembling subcollections of the Hathi Trust collection. There are also datasets available for download. The HTRC Extracted Features Dataset includes page-level features for 13.7 million volumes as well as word frequencies for all English language volumes.
Access Note: Patrons must register and create an account through Hathi Trust.
The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) strives to democratize access to the best data on religion. Founded as the American Religion Data Archive in 1997 and going online in 1998, the initial archive was targeted at researchers interested in American religion. The targeted audience and the data collection have both greatly expanded since 1998, now including American and international collections and developing features for educators, journalists, religious congregations, and researchers.