Did you find out about the data through an associated output (e.g. journal article, conference paper)?
- Go to the website of the publication (not necessarily through a library database - Google the journal title)
- Browse through back issues until you find the associated article or paper. Is the dataset listed as supplementary material?
- Check for a link somewhere on the publication's website about research data. Does the journal have a data publishing policy? Is there a repository of datasets associated with that publication?
- Search ICPSR's Bibliography of Data-related Literature, a list of publications based on data contained in ICPSR
- If you know of major repositories in that discipline, quickly search within them for the title of the article.
- Google (not Google Scholar) the title of the article within quotation marks and add the word data (outside of the quotation marks)
Are the data part of a large, ongoing project?
- See if the project has an associated website
- Search re3data for the name of the project. There might be a repository associated with the project
Are you looking for research data on a particular topic?
- Go to re3data and either browse through the list of repositories by discipline or, if your topic is broad, search for your topic. Keep in mind that re3data is a registry of repositories. When you are searching, you are searching for repositories, not datasets. Once you've identified potentially useful repositories, search within them for data on your topic
- Talk to your librarian
