Research Guides: How to Find Data: Home

Guide Contents

Email your data question to library@davidson.edu or make an appointment with a librarian using the button below.

A picture of numbers and a graph

Not sure where to start? Try a Data Compendium or Portal

The data compendia listed below provide data across multiple subject areas. Data portals allow you to search data from diverse sources.

If you are not sure what type of data you are looking for, a compendia is a good place to start exploring for possibilities.

Data Planet
Excellent tool for exploring data. View various datasets from a wide range of subjects in customized tables, maps, and charts.
Statistical Abstract of the United States
(2013 to present) Important compendium of statistics on the social, political, and economic conditions of the United States.
The Census Bureau stopped publishing this work in 2012. ProQuest began publishing its own version in 2013.

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
ICPSR is an archive of behavioral and social science data; most datasets are raw, primary data drawn from surveys, censuses, and administrative records. Several search tools are available for datasets or browse for them by categories such as topic, series, geography, investigator, or international. After finding a data set, users can click on the title to find its Study Home Page.
Special topics include: Aging, Arts and Culture, Criminal Justice, Health and Mental Health, Race and Ethnicity.
To download datasets you must set up an account using your Davidson email. Davidson is a member of ICPSR; use of the data is restricted to Davidson students, faculty and staff engaged in non-commercial research projects.

UNdata
Searchable international data from the UN covering various topics. Also serves as a portal to other international data sources.