Reuse data and search for existing datasets

Why using secondary data ?

Using data collected by other researchers is very interesting for your research.

1. You may want to find data similar to yours but collected in other places/time period (comparison, discussion).
2. You may want to provide data in your research project proposal.
3. You may want to give information in a paper, without collecting data yourself.

How to do it ?

Check to see if there are any existing data that you can reuse, for examples by consulting relevant repositories.

You may find data via several ways. For example:

1. EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) lists repositories, via which you can find data
2.  OpenAIRE has a browser for all research results and data collected in a research project financed by the European Commission
3. re3data.org. This website is dedicated to data repository searches. You can enter you research topic subject on the browser, and the add appropriate filter (options on the left) or browse results by country
4. FAIRsharing: helps you find data repositories, preservation policies and standards to make your data FAIR;
5. Data.europa.eu : the Official portal for European data, classified by themes
6. You can find datasets via Mendeley Data* website
7. Google* recently developed a browser to search for existing datasets. But you can also use the general browser with some boolean request like: [research topic] + (database OR registry OR dataset OR statistics)

* Use of theses commercials sources are not validated by authorities