A number of government agencies, research institutes, and universities make their data available to the public on-line. This page is designed to expose you to the available avenues for accessing on-line data for economic research and social science research more broadly.
If you Google your topic with the term "statistics" or "data," Google is unlikely to produce results that offer you good data. However, within your results, you may find articles that cite original data sets from institutions like universities, research centers, government agencies, or non-partisan think tanks.
To increase your odds of finding useful citations, try searching for your topic and "statistics" or "data" using Google Scholar and Google News. In your results, take note of which institutions collect the data that interest you. Find those institutions on-line via Google and explore the data pages of their websites.
Data archive hosting 16 specialized data collections in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other social science fields.
Online research tool designed to provide quick and easy access to current and historical census data and demographic information.
Journalists and social commentators are increasingly using infographs and data visualization to express trends, relationships, and to make sense of the abundance of available data. Infographics are familiar visual representations and illustrations of single variables measured across time or location. Data visualizations often express more complex relationships within larger data sets. Some of the best data visualizations allow users to interact with the visualization in order to ask their own questions of the data.
The list of links below directs you to some of the best infographs and data visualizations on the web. Explore these to generate ideas for your research.
