LibGuides: Plan II Thesis: Finding Data

Sources for Finding Data

Explore Census Data This link opens in a new window
Most current edition. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Provides population, housing, industry, economic, and geographic data and maps from the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Social Explorer This link opens in a new window
1790 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Provides easy access to historical census data for the United States. Allows users to visually analyze and understand the demography of any part of the United States with access to the following:
- Interactive thematic maps of historical census data
- Customized reports for any chosen area or areas (including aggregates)
- Complete coverage of the United States, down to neighborhoods and streets
- Simple navigation buttons and a find tool make it easy and efficient to study neighborhoods
Users can examine geographic areas while selecting the type of data to be shown, such as population density or income level. The corresponding data tables are also available.
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research This link opens in a new window
1937 - present. Unlimited users.
Provided by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, Roper iPoll is the largest collection of public opinion poll data with results from 1935 to the present. Roper iPoll contains nearly 800,000 questions and over 23,000 datasets from both U.S. and international polling firms. Surveys cover any number of topics including, social issues, politics, pop culture, international affairs, science, the environment, and much more. When available, results charts, demographic crosstabs and full datasets are provided for immediate download.

Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Data & Statistics

Search for CDC data and statistics by topic.
Data.CDC.gov

Find a variety of data sources that are tracked by CDC. Examples include: Smoking & Tobacco Use, vaccination, biomonitoring, or Web Metrics.
Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) Center for Health Statistics

The DSHS Center for Health Statistics was established to provide a convenient access point for health-related data for Texas.

World Health Organization
Find international health data including influenza, HIV, oral health, health expenditures, vaccination data and more. Data provided by the World Health Organization available in aggregate statistics at country level.

ED Data Express
K-12 data and demographics provided by the U.S. Department of Education. Features statistic datasets at the school level.
National Center for Education Statistics
This site features surveys and longitudinal data organized by group, such as early childhood, elementary secondary, post-secondary, international and library. Data is provided via the U.S. Department of Education.
Texas Higher Education Data
This website features reports and associated data dashboards on topics such as student debt and transfer student success. Most raw data must be requested. Data provided by the Texas Higher Ed Coordinating Board.
TEA Reports and Data
This website features reports and statistical data on topics such as educator data, school reports, student data and and financial reports.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library Data

The Life Cycle Assessment Commons (LCA Commons) is a data repository hosted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Library (NAL). It is a repository dedicated to access and long-term preservation of life cycle assessment (LCA) data, tools, and resources. We support LCA researchers by collecting, curating, archiving, publishing, and preserving LCA data sets related to agriculture.
NCEI-National Centers for Environmental Information Data

Formally known as NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US Government. NCEI is responsible for hosting and providing access to one of the most significant archives on Earth, with comprehensive oceanic, atmospheric, and geophysical data.
Global Forest Watch Data

Global Forest Watch (GFW) is an online platform that provides data and tools for monitoring forests. By harnessing cutting-edge technology, GFW allows anyone to access near real-time information about where and how forests are changing around the world.
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

Established in 1964, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species has evolved to become the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of animal, fungi and plant species.

IMF eLibrary This link opens in a new window
1945 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated several times a year. Provides statistics on all aspects of international and domestic finance. Provides users with time series data of major economic aggregates used in economic analysis. The IFS reports, for most countries of the world, current data needed in the analysis of problems of international payments and of inflation and deflation, i.e., data on exchange rates, international liquidity, international banking, money and banking, interest rates, prices, production, international transactions, government accounts, and national accounts. Contains data from 1945 until the latest current month data has been released for (there is usually about a 2 month lag time).
Statista This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Statista provides statistical data from thousands of institutions and sources. It provides access to data from market and opinion research institutions, as well as from business organizations and government agencies.
Statista includes data on more than 85,000 topics from 18,000 sources. About 20 percent of the total data in Statista comes from sources available free online, such as the World Bank and the U.S. Census, but the data also includes numerous exclusive sources which include industry, marketing, and trade groups. Much of the data is related to marketing, demographic, government and industry information, and is international in scope. Data can be downloaded in JPG, PowerPoint and Excel.
While historical and time series data are not a focus of Statista, the metadata about each table provides all the necessary information to go to the table’s source, where historical information may be available.
World Development Indicators (WDI) This link opens in a new window
1960 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated quarterly. An extensive collection of data about global development. Provides more than 550 times series covering demographic, social, economic, financial, natural resources and environmental topics for more than 200 countries and 18 country groups. You can access the data through the dataBank, as an ebook, or in Excel or CSV formats.
World Bank Terms of Use

National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
Some data in this repository is open to the public, but some is behind a wall to protect privacy. This is the location where Department of Justice requires research data associated with grants to be deposited. Topics include:
- sexual assault
- crime reporting
- gang activity
- hate crimes
FBI Crime Data Explorer
Find data on reported crimes and uniformed officer statistics in the United States. Topics of interest:
- Hate Crimes
- National Use of Force Data
- Law Enforcement Suicide
- Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted
- Property Crime

Apply for Access to CrowdTangle
CrowdTangle started a pilot program in 2019 to partner with researchers and academics to help them study the spread of public content on Facebook and Instagram. In that time, researchers have used CrowdTangle to report on and analyze critical topics such as racial justice, misinformation and abuse of social platforms. Now, CrowdTangle is opening up applications further to university researchers.
DocNow Tweet Catalog
The DocNow Catalog is a collectively curated listing of Twitter datasets. Public datasets are shared as Tweet IDs, which can be hydrated back into full datasets using a Hydrator desktop application.
SOMAR - Social Media Archive at ICPSR
SOMAR's mission is to provide a centralized and reliable repository for social media research data. The archive contains a range of data collected from large-scale social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. The data in the archive takes two forms. They can be public, i.e., available for immediate download, and/or restricted, i.e., available within our secure data enclave after receiving approval following a submitted restricted data application.
Tweet Sets
Collection of large Twitter datasets (tweet IDs) on a variety of newsworthy topics, including a number of political and election-related topics (primarily US) back to 2016. To use them, you have to rehydrate the tweets using a tool like DocNow’s Hydrator: https://github.com/DocNow/hydrator.
X (formerly Twitter)
In order to view or search posts, you must have an individual account. As of 2023, the Twitter API is no longer freely available to academic researchers. For information on the cost for access see Twitter Data for Academic Research.
Twitter Scraping Research Guide
Twitter scraping can be done with or without API keys. This guide aims to make Twitter scraping widely accessible by providing sample scripts, a list of important scraping tools, additional resources to help manage your scraped data, and sample peer-reviewed studies using data harvested from Twitter.

Data.gov
This data is collected and made available by the government. Datasets range in topics from public safety, consumer and manufacturing to energy, climate and agriculture. Many of the datasets listed are available for download as csv files or json.
United Nations Data
Find data such as demographics, labor, world marriage data, world development indicators, contraceptive use, tourism and more. Provided by the United Nations, but also provides access to data from other trusted organizations like UNICEF and the World Bank.

Sports Reference
Find game and player statistics for football, baseball, hockey, basketball and soccer.
Equity in Athletics
Find data regarding sports and coaching at the collegiate level. Select schools to compare and generate data to download. This data is provided by the Office of Postsecondary Education (Dept. of Ed.)