Finding Relevant Datasets

RDM

To find reusable research data for teaching, learning, and research, start your search from data portals or locate data repositories relevant to your subject area. Also, check out the Libraries' electronic resources on census, statistics & surveys to find more related resources.

Data Portals

  • DataCite An integrated search interface of more than 2 million datasets by over 700 data centers around the world.  Research data which have persistent identifiers (DOIs) provided by DataCite are indexed in the portal.
  • Research Data Australia Discovery service of the Australian National Data Service.  It covers over 120,000 research data in different subjects from over 100 Australian research organizations, government agencies, and cultural institutions. 

Data Repositories

  • Re3data A directory of more than 1,500 research data repositories. Data repositories can be searched by names, keywords, subjects, content types, countries, etc. Browsing options by subjects, content types, and countries are also available.
  • General data repositories. These repositories are multi-disciplinary and may be relevant to researchers of different fields:
    • Dryad is a curated general-purpose repository which provides over 10,000 data packages arising from publications in about 500 scholarly journals.
    • figshare offers a platform for users to share all of their research outputs.  It has over 500,000 collections in various item types, including figure, media, dataset, etc.
    • Harvard Dataverse holds more than 1,500 Dataverses (collections) and 60,000 datasets in different research fields.
    • ICPSR is an established data archive with over 500,000 files of research from 9,600 studies in the social sciences.  HKU staff and students can create a user account to gain full direct access to the platform.
    • Zenodo is a platform for researchers to share and showcase multidisciplinary research results.  In addition to publications and datasets, it also hosts images, video/audio and software, etc.
    • HKU DataHub, the institutional data repository that holds research data and other scholarly outputs created by HKU scholars, researchers, research students and their collaborators. HKU researchers are encouraged to deposit their data in DataHub to increase their research visibility and impact.
  • Subject-specific data repositories. To identify a data repository related to your subject area, besides searching/browsing in re3data, check out the following lists:
  • Data journals. It is also possible to locate research data from data journals.  Data journals publish papers which describe findable, accessible, and reusable datasets.  Like other scholarly journals, data journals may be peer reviewed.  More information can be found at: