Finding and reusing data

Where to find data

Generally, the best source for published research datasets are Data Centres and Discipline based Data Repositories, that have been established by research funders and researcher communities. In order to find sources of research data for study and reuse, several strategies may be taken:

• Searching an appropriate disciplinary data repositories or data centre
• Searching a data portal or indexing service
• Finding data referred to or presented as supplementary material by journal papers

A disciplinary data centre or data repository may be discovered by searching registries of research data repositories:

• Re3Data provides a searchable directory of research data repositories.
• Research Pipeline is a guide to the world's free data
• Biosharing.org a curated, searchable portal of data standards, databases and policies in the life, environmental and biomedical sciences.

Data portals and indexing services provide searching across a number of repositories:

• DataCite – find a dataset. DataCite metadata is indexed by the University of Sheffield Library catalogue StarPlus
• European Union Open Data Portal
• Research Data Australia - the UK equivalent, UK research data registry and discovery service, is currently under development
• Data Citation Index (DCI) – from Web of Science. To access the DCI see the University of Sheffield Library page on Web of Science.
• EMBL-EBI - European Bioinformatics Institute

See more about research data repositories.

Published data referred to or reused in any way in your research, needs to be cited correctly. For more information, see Citation and credit.