LibGuides: Research Data and Reproducibility: Reusing Data

Where can data be discovered?

The Library's Dataset Identification Service helps researchers locate high quality datasets for secondary analysis, pilot studies, or to support grant proposals. Whether you're exploring publicly available datasets or looking for domain-specific data, we can help you find the most relevant and reliable sources.

Accessing Scientific Data
To bolster data sharing, NIH supports a number of data repositories. This page has a non-exhaustive list of NIH-supported repositories that offer a wide variety of datasets.
HealthData.gov
On this site, you can find data on a wide range of topics, including environmental health, medical devices, Medicare & Medicaid, social services, community health, mental health, and substance abuse.
The data is collected and supplied from agencies from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as well as state partners. This includes the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, among others.
NLM Dataset Catalog (beta)
The Dataset Catalog is a catalog of biomedical datasets from various repositories for users to search, discover, retrieve, and connect with datasets to accelerate scientific research. This beta version aims to collect user feedback to inform future product development.
ResDAC
The Research Data Assistance Center (ResDAC) is a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) contractor that provides assistance to researchers interested in CMS data.
CDC WONDER
CDC WONDER -- Wide-ranging ONline Data for Epidemiologic Research -- an easy-to-use, menu-driven system that makes the information resources of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) available to public health professionals and the public at large. It provides access to a wide array of public health information.
National Center for Health Statistics: Surveys and Data Collection Systems
Contains current data from surveys such as the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), birth and mortality detail files, National Immunization Survey, Longitudinal Study of Aging, and National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG)
Global Health Observatory
The GHO data repository is WHO's gateway to health-related statistics for its 194 Member States. It provides access to over 1000 indicators on priority health topics including mortality and burden of diseases, the Millennium Development Goals (child nutrition, child health, maternal and reproductive health, immunization, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, neglected diseases, water and sanitation), non communicable diseases and risk factors, epidemic-prone diseases, health systems, environmental health, violence and injuries, equity among others.
PLACES: Local Data for Better Health
PLACES is a collaboration between CDC, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the CDC Foundation. PLACES provides health data for small areas across the country. This allows local health departments and jurisdictions, regardless of population size and rurality, to better understand the burden and geographic distribution of health measures in their areas and assist them in planning public health interventions.

PLACES provides model-based, population-level analysis and community estimates of health measures to all counties, places (incorporated and census designated places), census tracts, and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) across the United States.

OCTRI Informatics Research Data Warehouse
OCTRI maintains a repository of Epic data from patients and research subjects. This valuable resource, called the Research Data Warehouse (RDW), provides access to over 2.5 million patient records with 20 million patient encounter records and more than 40,000 data points.
All of Us Research Hub
The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program is building one of the largest biomedical data resources of its kind. The All of Us Research Hub stores health data from a diverse group of participants from across the United States.
Register for the Researcher Workbench to access data and tools to conduct health research and improve understanding of health and disease.
UK Biobank
UK Biobank is a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing de-identified genetic, lifestyle and health information and biological samples from half a million UK participants.
It is the most comprehensive and widely-used dataset of its kind, and is globally accessible to approved researchers who are undertaking health-related research that is in the public interest, whether they are from academic, commercial, government or charitable settings.

Data.gov Data Catalog
Data.gov federates data from hundreds of sources, including federal government, cities, counties, states, and universities.
DataCite Commons Works Search
Find texts, datasets, and other research outputs by keyword and/or identifier.
DataHub
Dataset catalog from the creators of CKAN, the software that runs sites like data.gov.
DDC Data Discovery Systems
A collection of institutional research data catalogs from members of the Data Discovery Collaboration (DDC).
Google Datasets Search
Google's search engine for datasets that are freely available on the web.
Registry of Open Data on AWS
This registry helps people both discover and share datasets via Amazon Web Services.
Mendeley Data
An open repository for sharing research data and a search engine that indexes both domain-specific and cross-domain data repositories.
Open Data Network
Dataset search engine that aggregates a wide variety of city, state, and country government datasets

Re3Data
A global registry of research data repositories from a variety of academic disciplines.
FAIRsharing
FAIRsharing is a community-driven resource with users and collaborators across all disciplines. They work together with our stakeholders to enable the FAIR Principles by promoting the value and the use of standards, databases and policies.
DataCite Commons Repository Search
Search for domain-specific data repositories here.

Data journals are specialized publications that focus on publishing data papers to enhance the findability of high-quality datasets. Typically, they do not host data, but they may recommend places to deposit data. Below are some resources for finding data journals.

Data journals: incentivizing data access and documentation within the scholarly communication system
This article by William H. Walters describes the unique advantages of data journals and examines the data journal landscape, presenting the characteristics of 13 data journals in the fields of biology, environmental science, chemistry, medicine, and health sciences.
FOSTER: Open Data Journals
A collection of journals that publish peer-reviewed articles describing openly accessible datasets for future reuse, curated by the FOSTER Plus open science project.

Does permission need to be obtained to reuse data?

In the U.S., facts can't be copyrighted, so most raw data isn’t protected. However, curated data, tables, or visualizations can be.

Even without copyright, licenses help others understand how they can use your data. Some licenses may:

Require attribution
Limit commercial use
Protect participant privacy

Proprietary datasets may have restrictions or fees.

Publishing data under a public domain license (like CC0 or PDDL) supports broad reuse and avoids issues like license conflicts and attribution stacking, which is when too many credit requirements make reuse difficult.

Contact Technology Transfer if you have intellectual property questions about your data.

Contact the Library if you have any questions about licensing and attribution concerns related to data reuse.

Find more information about data licensing in the Sharing Data section of this guide.

OpenAIRE Guides for Researchers: Can I reuse someone else's data?
This guide discusses the practical concerns involved in licensing data for reuse, including how to find a dataset's license, how data licenses interact, the implications of Share Alike (SA) licenses, and datasets without licenses.
Introduction to intellectual property rights in data management
This guide from Cornell University's Research Data Management Service Group provides a nice overview of intellectual property concerns for data management, including an overview of open data licenses.

How should reused datasets be cited?

When citing data, the following elements should be included:

who created the dataset
what the dataset is named
what year the dataset was published or released
what version of the dataset was used
where the dataset is hosted
what unique identifiers have been assigned to the dataset, such as a Digital Object Identifer (DOI) or Archival Resource Key (ARK)
what date the dataset was accessed

Note that many data repositories offer features that automatically generate formatted citations for the data they host, which can save you the work of creating the citation from scratch.

Contact the Library if you have questions about how to format dataset citations for a specific citation style.

DataCite: Cite Your Data
This page from DataCite explains why data citation is important and provides examples of how to do so.
DCC: How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications
This detailed guide from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) covers the rationale for and principles of data citation, and provides citation guidance for both authors and data repositories.
APA Style: Data Set References
Examples and guidance for citing datasets in APA 7 style.
FORCE11 Data Citation Principles
FORCE11, a research communication and e-scholarship organization, encourages eight principles related to citing data.