Guides & Tutorials: Research Data Management: Data Collection

Data Collection

Data Collection is the process of importing and gathering information from various resources. Researchers can collect data via primary and secondary data sources.

Primary data: Newly generated data	Secondary data: Reuse of existing data
Case Studies Experiment Interviews Observation Simulation Surveys	Data Repositories Literature & other publications Oral History Statistics & Data Sources Textual Analysis Web Scrapping

Data Sources

Want to find datasets for a specific subject? Here is a list of sources to help you get started:

data.europa.eu
provides access to over one million open data from international, EU, national, regional, and local data portals.
DATA.GOV.HK
free resource developed by the Hong Kong government. It provides data about Hong Kong.
Google Public Data
provides public data and forecasts from a range of international institutions including World Bank, OECD, Eurostat, etc. The data can be displayed as line graphs, cross sectional plots, on maps, etc.
UNdata
contain over 60 million data points and cover a wide range of statistical themes including agriculture, crime, communication, development assistance, education, energy, environment, finance, gender, health, labour market, manufacturing, national accounts, population and migration, science and technology, tourism, transport and trade.
World Bank Data Catalog
includes data from the World Bank's microdata, finances and energy data platforms, as well as datasets from the open data catalog.

Kaggle
a website for people who are interested in data science and machine learning. It has about 170,000 freely available datasets.
UCI Machine Learning Repository
access over 600 datasets for the machine learning community.
Yelp Dataset
contains near to 7 million Yelp reviews, in addition to images and business attributes. Available as JSON files, use it to teach students about databases, to learn NLP, or for sample production data while you learn how to make mobile apps.

Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), created and maintained by the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is an online database containing hundreds of thousands of economic data time series from large numbers of national, international, public, and private sources.
International Labour Organization (ILO)
The ILO Department of Statistics is the focal point to the United Nations on labour statistics such as labor supply, working conditions, industrial relations, and poverty & inequality.
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Data
publishes a variety of time series data on lending, currency rates, and other economic and financial indicators.
OECD Statistics
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) includes data and metadata for OECD countries and selected non-member economies.

DataMed
A biomedical and healthcare data discovery index. Contain over 2 million datasets.
Global Health Observatory (GHO)
The GHO data repository is World Health Organization (WHO)'s gateway to health-related statistics for its Member States. It provides access to over 1000 indicators on priority health topics including mortality and diseases, health systems, environmental health, violence and injuries, equity among others.

Caselaw Access Project (CAP)
CAP expands public access to US legal resources. It contains over 6 million digitised court decisions from the Harvard Law School Library.
Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX)
is an accessible portal with over 20,000 humanitarian data.
Oxford Text Archive
A repository of full-text literary and linguistic resources. It includes thousands of texts in more than 25 languages.
UNICEF Data Warehouse
an authoritative source of data and information on children.

Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
free and open access to data on biodiversity, including over 70,000 datasets.
NASA’s Earthdata
one of the planet’s largest repositories of Earth observation data which help better understand climate change, severe weather, sea ice and glaciers, hazards and disasters, health and air quality, ecology, and water resources.
Ocean Data Viewer
offers users the opportunity to view and download a range of spatial datasets that are useful for informing decisions regarding the conservation, management and restoration of marine and coastal biodiversity.

Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA)
open access to the best religious data, including American and international collections from the world's leading researchers and research centres.
GSS Data
General Social Survey (GSS) dataset contains over 5,000 variables including data on a wide range of topics to explain trends in American demographics, behaviours, and opinions.
ICPSR
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.