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Finding Data on the Internet

You’ve cast your lines into the sea of sources, but still aren’t finding the information you need. That’s what happens when you don’t know the right place to look.

Scroll down to the links below and your days of coming up empty while reporting are over. You’ll soon be checking facts and downloading reputable data on everything from public safety to campaign contributions … you name it.

Want more tips? Try my other pages:
How to Use Math and Statistics
Questions to Ask Candidates for Public Office.

Basic Stuff

If you go to just one site for U.S. government data, let it be FedStats
Find the current time for anyplace on Earth, thanks to the U.S. Naval Observatory.
Worry no more about how many square feet are in an acre, or how many meters are in a mile. Convert most anything to anything else at onlineconversion.com.
Need a scientific, currency or other financial calculator? Try calculator.com.
How far is City A from City B? Your answer awaits here.
Get political, satellite, historical and street maps for anywhere on Earth from National Geographic.
Agriculture

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s State Fact Sheets are available online. They include aggregate population, farm and agribusiness stats for each state.
More than 300 USDA reports and databases, including everything from crop statistics to trade reports, are available through Cornell University. The reports and databases are keyword searchable, too.
Check out some of the popular reports requested through the Freedom of Information Act from the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.
The Foreign Agriculture Office of the USDA has made much of its trade data and analysis of world agriculture available.
International reporters will want to search the agriculture information database from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
Crime

Find incident-based crime statistics from the FBI.
Find survey-based crime statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Browse an excellent list of links to international and selected individual U.S. state, local and campus crime statistics.
Economics

International economic, social, agricultural and health data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
You can use this handy calculator to compare the costs of living in U.S. and selected Canadian cities.
Find demographic information from government statistics bureaus in Australia or Canada.
The definitive one-stop source for information about Latin American nations can be found by visiting LANIC at the University of Texas.
Download population, housing or economic data for any community in the U.S. from the Census Bureau.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has made a variety of useful national economic data available through its site. The “Economy at a Glance” section offers monthly employment, inflation and growth numbers for the past 14 months. The “Data” section offers access to more-detailed BLS timeseries employment data.
Examine information about the nation’s taxpayers from the Internal Revenue Service.
The Social Security Administration has put data profiling SSI recipients online, as well as information on the earnings and employment of Social Security-eligible U.S. workers.
The Population Reference Bureau provides population resources and world population data.
Education

A far more comprehensive collection of U.S. education data is available from the National Center for Education Statistics.
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) provides a wide variety of materials and data for teachers and researchers.
Energy

The U.S. Energy Information Administration provides worldwide usage data and demand forecasts for most any energy source you can think of.
Finding People

Find people or businesses in the United States by searching the online white pages. Look for international phone directories and calling codes here.
Look up the birthdays of more than 100 million people in the United States via anybirthday.com. You can also find individuals’ last known zip code.
Find where to write or call for vital records in the U.S. by checking this guide from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Health

Query national health statistics at the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics .
Look at international health statistics from the World Health Organization.
Here’s a nice page providing background on legal issues in health care.
Investing

Check out the background of many of the nation’s publicly-traded corporations through the SEC’s EDGAR site.
Language

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus.
Writing a poem or lyric and need a rhyme? Try the WriteExpress Online Rhyming Dictionary.
Law and Politics

The basic skinny on every nation on Earth is in the CIA World Factbook
Or find out what the laws are here in the U.S. by checking out the United States Code
Track all pending U.S. Congressional legislation through Thomas
Check this page for links to the web sites of all 50 U.S. state legislatures
The most important aspect of government and political coverage in the United States is tracking campaign contributions. (See my article on the subject.) Here are some links to help you “follow the money.

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Data Analysis

You wouldn’t buy a car or a house without asking some questions about it first. So don’t go buying into someone else’s data without asking questions, either.

Okay, you’re saying… but with data there are no tires to kick, no doors to slam, no basement walls to check for water damage. Just numbers, graphs and other scary statistical things that are causing you to have bad flashbacks to your last income tax return. What the heck can you ask about data?

Plenty. Here are a few standard questions you should ask any human beings who slap a pile of data in front of you and ask you write about it.
Where did the data come from? Always ask this one first. You always want to know who did the research that created the data you’re going to write about.

You’d be surprised – sometimes it turns out that the person who is feeding you a bunch of numbers can’t tell you where they came from. That should be your first hint that you need to be very skeptical about what you are being told.

Even if your data have an identifiable source, you still want to know what it is. You might have some extra questions to ask about a medical study on the effects of secondhand smoking if you knew it came from a bunch of researchers employed by a tobacco company instead of from, say, a team of research physicians from a major medical school, for example. Or if you knew a study about water safety came from a political interest group that had been lobbying Congress for a ban on pesticides.

Just because a report comes from a group with a vested interest in its results doesn’t guarantee the report is a sham. But you should always be extra skeptical when looking at research generated by people with a political agenda. At the least, they have plenty of incentive NOT to tell you about data they found that contradict their organization’s position.

Which brings us to the next question:

Have the data been peer-reviewed? Major studies that appear in journals like the New England Journal of Medicine undergo a process called “peer review” before they are published. That means that professionals – doctors, statisticians, etc. – have looked at the study before it was published and concluded that the study’s authors pretty much followed the rules of good scientific research and didn’t torture their data like a middle ages infidel to make the numbers conform to their conclusions.

Always ask if research was formally peer reviewed. If it was, you know that the data you’ll be looking at are at least minimally reliable.
And if it wasn’t peer-reviewed, ask why. It may be that the research just wasn’t interesting to enough people to warrant peer review. Or it could mean that the research had as much chance of standing up to professional scrutiny as a $500 mobile home has of standing up in a tornado.
How were the data collected? This one is real important to ask, especially if the data were not peer-reviewed. If the data come from a survey, for example, you want to know that the people who responded to the survey were selected at random.
In 1997, the Orlando Sentinel released the results of a poll in which more than 90 percent of those people who responded said that Orlando’s National Basketball Association team, the Orlando Magic, shouldn’t re-sign its center, Shaquille O’Neal, for the amount of money he was asking. The results of that poll were widely reported as evidence that Shaq wasn’t wanted in Orlando, and in fact, O’Neal signed with the Los Angeles Lakers a few days later.
Unfortunately for Magic fans, that poll was about as trustworthy as one of those cheesy old “Magic 8 Balls.” The survey was a call-in poll where anyone who wanted could call a telephone number at the paper and register his or her vote.
This is what statisticians call a “self-selected sample.” For all we know, two or three people who got laid off that morning and were ticked off at the idea of someone earning $100 million to play basketball could have flooded the Sentinel’s phone lines, making it appear as though the people of Orlando despised Shaq.
Another problem with data is “cherry-picking.” This is the social-science equivalent of gerrymandering, where you draw up a legislative district so that all the people who are going to vote for your candidate are included in your district and everyone else is scattered among a bunch of other districts.

Be on the lookout for cherry-picking, for example, in epidemiological (a fancy word for the study of disease that sometimes means: “We didn’t go out and collect any data ourselves. We just used someone else’s data and played ‘connect the dots’ with them in an attempt to find something interesting.”) studies looking at illnesses in areas surrounding toxic-waste dumps, power lines, high school cafeterias, etc. It is all too easy for a lazy researcher to draw the boundaries of the area he or she is looking at to include several extra cases of the illness in question and exclude many healthy individuals in the same area.

When in doubt, plot the subjects of a study on map and look for yourself to see if the boundaries make sense.
Be skeptical when dealing with comparisons. Researchers like to do something called a “regression,” a process that compares one thing to another to see if they are statistically related. They will call such a relationship a “correlation.” Always remember that a correlation DOES NOT mean causation.

A study might find that an increase in the local birth rate was correlated with the annual migration of storks over the town. This does not mean that the storks brought the babies. Or that the babies brought the storks.

Statisticians call this sort of thing a “spurious correlation,” which is a fancy term for “total coincidence.