Research Toolkit: Locate Data Sources

What is Data?

Where can I find datasets?

Finding data for your research can be time consuming and may involve searching major sources of published research data such as:

• Government websites
• Data directories
• Subject based repositories
• Institutional repositories
• Research centre websites
• Internet search engines e.g. Google or Google Scholar 

Australian repositories

• Research Data Australia (RDA)
• data.gov.au
• Australian Data Archive
• Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Commercial data repositories and registries

• Dryad
• Figshare
• Google Dataset Search (beta)

International data archives

• World Bank Open Data
• World Bank Research Datasets
• re3data.org

Using and citing datasets

Using datasets

When research data is used you will need to acknowledge the original author or source; this also enables other researchers to find the resource. 

Some important things to note when using data that is not open commons (free to share or use):

• datasets that have been licensed, only use it in the way that is permitted by the license.
• If the data has not been licensed, contact the data owner (rights holder) to obtain permission to re-use the data.

Citing datasets

It is important that you attribute or give credit to any datasets that you use, modify or adapt.

The Australian National Data Service's (ANDS) guide provides information on how to cite data.

• ANDS Data Citation Guide