Research Guides: Qualitative Data Analysis Tools: Finding Qual Datasets

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Places to Find Data Sets

The Qualitative Data Repository The Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) is a dedicated archive for storing and sharing digital data (and accompanying documentation) generated or collected through qualitative and multi-method research in the social sciences and related disciplines. QDR provides leadership and training in—and works to develop and publicize common standards and practices for—managing, archiving, sharing, reusing, and citing qualitative data. Through these efforts we aim to expand and improve the use of qualitative data in the production and evaluation of research, and in teaching.
ICPSR ICPSR is an international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations. ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. ICPSR collaborates with a number of funders, including U.S. statistical agencies and foundations, to create thematic data collections and data stewardship and research projects.
Data.gov Data.gov was launched in 2009 and is managed and hosted by the U.S. General Services Administration, Technology Transformation Service. It is a database of the United States Government's open data, containing data about agriculture, climate, education, finance, health and other topics.
Awesome Public Datasets This list of a topic-centric public data sources in high quality. They are collected and tidied from blogs, answers, and user responses. Most of the data sets listed are free, however, some are not.
Kaggle Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google, is an online community platform for data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts. Kaggle allows users to collaborate with other users, find and publish datasets, use GPU integrated notebooks, and compete with other data scientists to solve data science challenges.
Microsoft Research Open Data Microsoft Research Open Data is a data repository that makes available datasets that researchers at Microsoft have created and published in conjunction with their research. You can browse available datasets and either download them or directly copy them to an Azure-based Virtual Machine or Data Science Virtual Machine. They mostly follow FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data principles.
World Bank Open Data At the World Bank, the Development Data Group coordinates statistical and data work and maintains a number of macro, financial and sector databases. Working closely with the Bank’s regions and Global Practices, the group is guided by professional standards in the collection, compilation and dissemination of data to ensure that all data users can have confidence in the quality and integrity of the data produced. Much of the data comes from the statistical systems of member countries, and the quality of global data depends on how well these national systems perform.
World Health Organization Data WHO's World Health Data Hub is a comprehensive digital platform for global health data. It provides end-to-end solutions to collect, store, analyze, and share data that is timely, reliable, and actionable.
Data.europa.eu The portal is a central point of access to European open data from international, European Union, national, regional, local and geodata portals. It consolidates the former EU Open Data Portal and the European Data Portal.
Figshare figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner
Zenodo Zenodo helps researchers receive credit by making the research results citable and through OpenAIRE integrates them into existing reporting lines to funding agencies like the European Commission. Citation information is also passed to DataCite and onto the scholarly aggregators.
Harvard Dataverse The Harvard Dataverse Repository is a free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, both inside and outside of the Harvard community, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data. Each individual Dataverse collection is a customizable collection of datasets (or a virtual repository) for organizing, managing, and showcasing datasets.

English-Corpora.org English-Corpora.org: a brief overview A corpus (plural: corpora) is simply a highly structured collection of texts, which allows researchers to carry out extremely sophisticated searches to see what is happening in the language (for example between genres, dialects, and over time) in ways that would never be possible with other simple search engines like Google. Corpora also allow learners and teachers to easily find a wide range of data on words, phrases, and grammatical constructions – far beyond what would be found in a textbook or dictionary. The corpora from English-Corpora.org are used more than any other corpora – with more than 85,000 users each month. Limited, basic access is free, but hundreds of universities have purchased academic licenses for expanded access, especially by classes. The corpora are used by: ➢ Tens of thousands of researchers from universities throughout the world, for thousands of publications ➢ Hundreds of thousands of learners and teachers ➢ Many companies, especially in the fields of technology

HathiTrust Partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of public domain titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Project Gutenberg Free public domain ebooks, mostly older literary works.

Google Dataset Search Dataset Search is a search engine for datasets. Using a simple keyword search, users can discover datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web.
re3data.org Re3data is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It includes repositories that enable permanent storage of and access to data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers, and scholarly institutions. re3data promotes a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data. The registry has gone live in autumn 2012 and has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Open Access Directory's List of Open Repositories This is a list of repositories and databases for open data.
Open Access Directory's List of Repositories by Discipline
FAIRsharing.org A registry of knowledgebases and repositories of data and other digital assets.
NIH-Supported Data Sharing Resources To help researchers locate an appropriate repository for sharing or accessing data, BMIC maintains lists of domain-specific and generalist data sharing repositories that are each described by several properties (See Repository Properties Definitions below). The listed Institute, Office, or Center (ICO) may fund the repository in whole or in part, or the repository may house data related to the ICO’s research focus.
PLOS One's list of recommended data repositories PLOS (Public Library of Science) has identified a set of established repositories, listed below, that are recognized and trusted within their respective communities.
Paperswithcode: Machine Learning Datasets
PANGEA Data Publisher Our services are open for archiving, publishing, and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. The World Data Center PANGAEA is a member of the World Data System.

What are APIs?

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) allow two software components to communicate with each other; APIs allow the transfer of data between two systems (which can be things like apps or computers).

Using APIs allows businesses to connect the applications they use, ensuring that information can be shared quickly and easily. For example, APIs allow companies to use payment services (like credit cards).

API architecture can be understood in terms of "client" and "server." The application sending the request is called the client (so with the payment example, the payment company), and the application sending the response is called the server (the company producing the product or service).

Open Access APIs on GitHub A collective list of free APIs for use in software and web development.
News APIs at CU Boulder Information on CU Boulder Libraries' databases that allow researchers to use an API (application programming interface) and who to contact to learn more.
Census APIs
Census Data API User Guide The purpose of this user guide is to instruct developers and researchers on how to use the Census Data Application Programming Interface (API) to request data from U.S. Census Bureau datasets.
Using APIs in the Web of Science Database
Temple University's API List for Academic Research Curated by Alex Wermer-Colan, Digital Scholarship Coordinator
University of California San Diego's API List

"Metadata" are often described as "data about data." In the context of a data set, metadata provides information about the content of a data set, how it was created, and how it can be used. Metadata is essential for finding, understanding, and the correct re-use of a data set.

Metadata standards are rules for how metadata is recorded and structured. They are developed by communities to help regulate the creation of data sets so that the needed information about any data set is easy to find and understand. This allows the sharing and reuse of data and the sharing of new information.

Digital Curation Centre's (DCC) List of Metadata Standards The issue of disciplinary metadata standards - what they are, who's using them, how to use them - has been gaining attention in the RDM community. To support this, we have created an online resource for those who need help figuring out what standards might address their own needs.
RDA Metadata Standards Catalog The RDA Metadata Standards Catalog is a collaborative, open directory of metadata standards applicable to research data. It is offered to the international academic community to help address infrastructure challenges.