Boston Data and Statistics

Google has a dedicated Dataset Search Tool to find data sets available to you. Click here to connect to the portal and search your keywords. 

For finding the data set best for you and your research topic, we want to think about the keywords most relevant to your search. For example, if I am researching the cost of attending college in the United States, some keywords relevant to my research might be:

• college
• university
• cost 
• United States 

Then, we want to add in keywords that have to do with data and data sets. For example:

• data
• data set
• statistics
• public data set
• public data source

When I put these together, we can search Google for my keywords together. For example:

college cost united states data set

OR:

college cost united states statistics

You can follow along with our search with these keywords here. We are then seeing results from the National Center for Education Statistics and Kaggle, and many others. 

As with all sources, we want to double-check the origin of our data sets by asking ourselves questions like:

• What person or organization is behind this data-set?
• How was the data collected?
• What opportunities for bias or misrepresentation of context might be at play?
• Is it available for public download and manipulation?

If you have questions about whether or not you can use a data set for your assignment, please check with your instructor.