Research Guides: Data Reference Toolkit: 3. Finding Data

Compendia, portals, and indexes

When data are likely to be compiled or reported, these tools allow you to search by topic and discover data and data producers.

Data Planet Statistical Datasets
Data holdings for the United States are significant with some data available at state, county, or local geographies. International data,available at the country level, include population, food and agriculture, labor, trade, and more. Data are organized by subject and source.

Tags: Dataplanet
ProQuest International DataSets
A focus of the product is sub-national data for the countries of the world that is, data by country, city, state or province.
ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States
ProQuest Statistical Insight
Whenever possible, the Superintendent of Documents classification number, the Library of Congress card number, the Government Printing Office (GPO) Monthly Catalog entry number, the GPO stock number, and the depository item number are also included. The abstract may also contain two hypertext links - one to the agency's World Wide Web site where the full text of the publication may be viewed and downloaded; the other to the full text on Statistical Universe, where the publication can be viewed, downloaded and accessed section by section or table by table.
Social Explorer

When data are likely to be shared by the researchers who produced them, they are likely to deposit the data in repositories. Likely candidates:

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

ICPSR maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction.

Find questionnaires, polls, and public opinion survey data from Roper, Gallup, GSS and the Census.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

ICPSR maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction.

Polling the Nations
Although the database contains polls from all over the world, the majority were conducted in the United States. Each record in the database consists of one poll question and the participants' responses. Also includes source of poll, contact information, sample size, and notes on the sample population. Records are searchable by subject, publication year, general and specific location of poll and survey method.
Roper Center Public Opinion Archives (with iPOLL)
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American Memory

The content is primarily based on the collections of the Library of Congress, but also draws from the University of Michigan's Making of America project. This free resource is an extraordinarily rich documentary source for American history and culture.

LexisNexis Academic (Nexis Uni)
Contains speeches (particularly political speeches). To search for Transcripts use the guided news search.

ProQuest Central
Look for transcripts of speeches by searching for Transcript and [person, place or event].

Covering more than 160 subjects areas, ProQuest Central is the largest aggregated database of periodical content and includes scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, books, newspapers, reports and videos.