Use this list of 50 publicly available websites that provide data on government, global issues, scholarly articles, social media, marketing, science, journalism, media and so much more.

 

Government

• U.S. Census Bureau – The Census Bureau’s mission is to serve as the leading source of quality data about the people and economy of the US, including population data, geographic data, and education.
• U.S. Food & Drug Administration – Here you will find a compressed data file of the Drugs@FDA database. The file is updated once per week, on Wednesday.
• U.S. National Center for Education Statistics – The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.
• Uniform Crime Reporting – The UCR Program has been the starting place for law enforcement executives, students, researchers, members of the media, and the public seeking information on crime in the US.
• European Union Open Data Portal – The European Union Open Data Portal is the single point of access to a growing range of data from the institutions and other bodies of the European Union.
• Eurostat – Here you will find the key to European statistics. Feel free to search by theme, learning about the European economy, population, industry, trade, technology, and transport.
• UK Data Service – The UK Data Service includes major UK government-sponsored surveys, cross-national surveys, longitudinal studies, UK census data, international aggregate, business data, and qualitative data.
• Data.gov – Data.gov is home to the US government’s open data. Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, and design data visualizations.
• Data.gov.uk – Data.gov.uk is home to the UK government’s open data. Find data published by government departments and agencies, public bodies and local authorities.
• Data.gov.au – Data.gov.au is home to the Australian government’s open data. The site encourages the public to use government data to analyze, mashup and develop tools and applications.

 

Global Data

• The World Factbook – The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.
• International Monetary Fund – IMF Data offers access to macroeconomic and financial data. Created in 1945, the IMF is governed by and accountable to the 189 countries that make up its near-global membership.
• UNICEF Research and Reports – UNICEF gathers evidence on the situation of women and children globally. The data sets include accurate, nationally representative data from household surveys and other sources.
• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – One of the key tasks of UNODC is to produce and disseminate accurate statistics on drugs, crime and criminal justice at the international level.
• World Health Organization – The Global Health Observatory provides data and analysis on global health priorities, including world hunger and disease.
• Google Finance – Google Finance provides you with up-to-date stock market data, market news, and data on emerging trends. You can also create a portfolio and manage your own stocks.
• Google Public Data – Launched in March 2010, the Google Public Data Explorer makes large, public-interest data sets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.
• UNESCO – UIS.Stat contains all the latest available data and indicators, for education, literacy, science, technology, innovation, culture, communication and information.
• World Bank Open Data – The World Bank’s data catalog is a listing of available World Bank datasets, including databases, pre-formatted tables, reports, and other resources.
• World Bank Education Stats – Education is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing poverty and inequality. The World Bank compiles data on education inputs, participation, efficiency, and outcomes.
• UNICEF Education Stats – UNICEF provides administrative data on school participation, including net and gross enrolment ratios and survival ratios, by educational level.
• Open Data for Africa – Here you can visualize Socio-Economic indicators over a period of time, gain access to presentation-ready graphics and perform comprehensive analysis on a Country and Regional level.

 

Academic

• Google Scholar – Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature and academic studies.
• Pew Research Center’s Internet Project – PEW offers scholars and the general public access to raw data sets from their research. You can track key national, political, economic and demographic trends in the US.
• Europeana Collections – Explore 54,165,855 artworks, artifacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe.
• Science and Health
• NOAA’s Science On a Sphere – Science On a Sphere is a large visualization system that uses computers and video projectors to display animated data onto the outside of a sphere.
• Open Science Data Cloud – The Open Science Data Cloud provides the scientific community with resources for storing, sharing, and analyzing terabyte and petabyte-scale scientific datasets.
• HealthData.gov – This site is dedicated to making high-value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers, and policy makers in the hopes of better health outcomes for all.
• National Centers for Environmental Information – This page provides quick access to many of NCEI’s climate and weather datasets, products, and various resources.
• The Broad Institute Cancer Programs Data – The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT is committed to meeting the most critical challenges in biology and medicine.
• National Weather Service – Climate data, including past weather conditions and long-term averages, for specific observing stations around the United States is only a few clicks away.
• NASA’s Planetary Data System – The PDS archives and distributes scientific data from NASA planetary missions, astronomical observations, and laboratory measurements.
• NASA’s Earth Data – NASA ESDS Program sets the standard for the delivery of science-quality data related to planet Earth. Search datasets, news, articles, and additional information.

 

Marketing and Social Media

• Social Mention – Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.
• Google Trends – Google Trendsshows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world in various languages.
• Facebook API – Learn how to publish to and retrieve data from Facebook using the Graph API.
• Twitter API – The Twitter Platform connects your website or application with the worldwide conversation happening on Twitter.
• Instagram API – The Instagram API Platform can be used to build non-automated, authentic, high-quality apps and services.
• Foursquare API – The Foursquare API gives you access to our world-class places database and the ability to interact with Foursquare users and merchants.

 

Journalism and Media

• The New York Times Developer Network – Search Times articles from 1851 to today, retrieving headlines, abstracts and links to associated multimedia. You can also search book reviews, NYC event listings, movie reviews and more.
• Associated Press API – The AP Content API allows you to search and download content using your own editorial tools, without having to visit AP portals.
• Amazon Web Services – Browse Amazon Web Services’ Public Data Sets by category for a huge wealth of information.
• Google Books Ngram Viewer – The Google Books Ngram Viewer is optimized for quick inquiries into the usage of small sets of phrases.
• Wikipedia: Database – Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries.
• FiveThirtyEight GitHub – Data and code behind the stories and interactives at FiveThirtyEight.

 

Miscellaneous

• Datasets Subreddit – This popular subreddit offers datasets for data mining, analytics, and knowledge discovery.
• Million Song Dataset – The Million Songs Collection is a collection of 28 datasets containing audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks.
• IMDB – This page describes various alternate ways to access IMDb locally by holding copies of the data directly on your system.
• Generate Data – Generate Data is a free, open source tool written in JavaScript, PHP and MySQL that lets you quickly generate large volumes of custom data in a variety of formats.
• Gapminder – Gapminder produces free teaching resources making the world understandable based on reliable statistics. Gapminder promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand.