Finding datasets to use in research

May 18, 2020

In empirical research, scientific data is a very important part. Due to modern technology, scientists are creating a much larger amount of scientific data. Many new tools and software developed that allow you to analyze, store, manage, and share this data. Scientific data is any information collected, by observation, through surveys, experiments, created or collected using a variety of data collection methods to validate research findings.

Research data is any information that has been collected, observed, generated or created to validate original research findings. Research data can take many forms. It might be: documents, spreadsheets, laboratory notebooks, field notebooks, diaries, questionnaires, transcripts, codebooks, audiotapes, videotapes, photographs, films, test responses, slides, artefacts, specimens, samples, collections of digital outputs, data files, database contents (video, audio, text, images), contents of an application (input, output, logfiles for analysis software, simulation software, schemas), methodologies and workflows, standard operating procedures and protocols.

Writing scientific papers you can to reuse existing data instead of collecting it yourself, there are good sources for potentially relevant existing data. Researchers, governments, and other institutions are increasingly making their datasets available to other researchers for re-use.There are thousands of data repositories worldwide, housing datasets from a wide range of research areas. Some repositories hold subject specific data, while others contain data from several different disciplines.

Find repositories in your research area.

Search the re3data (Registry of Research Data Repositories) to find relevant repositories.

re3data is a DataCite service. It provides information on over 2,000 research data repositories from every domain and in every country. You can browse by subject, country, or content type, and search by any combination of 41 different attributes.

The results in re3data.org provide a lot of information about repository. In this results you can find a general description of the repository, subject areas that it relates to, whether data in the repository is openly available, and whether terms of use or reuse licenses are specified for datasets in the repository.

re3data will help you find discipline specific repositories

DataCite will search across multiple repositories to find datasets related to your subject.

Other resources for finding data repositories and archives exist, such as the FAIRsharing databases catalogue and the Open Access Directory's list of data repositories

You can also search scientific datasets in multi-disciplinary repositories:
DRYAD – is a repository governed by a nonprofit membership organization. Several publishers partner with DRYAD to coordinate the submission of manuscripts with submission of data to DRYAD.
FigShare – is a repository owned by Digital Science. It is free to use for researchers.
Zenodo – data uploading, storage and access is free. This repository is linked to Horizon 2020 projects, and OpenAIRE. The European Commission funds this repository. Each data set assigned digital persistent identifiers (DOIs).
Mendeley.Data – is an open research data repository, where researchers can upload and share their research data. Datasets can be shared privately amongst individuals, as well as published to share with the world. Sharing research data is important for science as it enables data reuse and supports reproducibility of studies. Sharing data is also a fantastic way for you as a researcher, to gain exposure for your research outputs, as every dataset has a DOI and can be cited.

Others multi-disciplinary repositories:
4TU.ResearchData – archive for technical data.
B2SHARE
PANGAEA

National data repositories:
The National Open Access Research Data Archive (MIDAS) is a digital platform for storing, managing and publishing research data from various scholarly disciplines and for discovering research data created by others.

Search methods are different in each repository. We recommend finding a repository user guide that will allow you to perform the most optimal search and efficiently find data set what you interesting. Also, carefully evaluate the quality of the data source.

Research data is the same as any other type of publication, cite it as you would any other academic source: that is, with appropriate citations within the text and as an entry in your reference list.
A simple data citation format is:  Creator (Publication Year): Title. Version. Publisher. Resource Type. Identifier

Do you have any questions?

All the answers to your questions:
E-mail: infokonsultantai@vgtu.lt
Sent messages: VGTU library Facebook

 

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