Best Practices for Finding Research Data
In the spring of 2021, librarians from the University of California, San Francisco Library and the University of Nebraska Medical Center McGoogan Health Sciences Library worked together on a data searching guide as part of a capstone collaboration with the Interprofessional Informationist program at Simmons University. We started the project by exploring the literature to identify best practices or procedures related to data searching. Surprisingly, we could not locate a lot of information on this topic or identify a guideline that we could refer to. Our review found that these best practices lived more on online resources such as library-owned LibGuides created by data science librarians.
To share this information with our local audiences, we developed a LibGuide page that covers best practices for finding research data. The goal of the page is to create a reference that students, researchers, faculty, and other library users can utilize when searching for data on their own.
Broadly, we recommend that users take a two-step approach:
Step 1: Narrow Down the Research Question
We encourage users to start their search by reviewing the research topic. We provide questions that they should consider before initiating a search:
- What is the topic?
- What is the time period (date limits)?
- Who would have this kind of data (government, organizations, etc.)?
Step 2: Searching
Once the topic is clear, there are a lot of places to find data, and the best approach can differ based on the topic or domain. We offer a condensed list of resources and suggestions to start:
- searching for data in PubMed
- topic-focused data repositories (clinical data, social sciences, public health, etc.)
- utilizing Google searching tools
- additional resources to explore to help locate datasets
The best practices can be viewed on the UCSF Reproducible Data Management LibGuide.
This is an evolving guide, so we would love to hear from you! In particular, we would love any thoughts on where you look for data or how you approach data searching. We appreciate any feedback or strategies you would like to share with us. Please reach out to Ariel Deardorff and Danielle Westmark with questions or comments.