Sometimes you may find you need to search for data and statistics on a specific topic. For example, the number of cases of influenza in children in a particular year.
PolicyMap is an online mapping site that provides data on demographics, real estate, health, jobs, and other areas across the U.S. You can find PolicyMap in the A-Z list of library databases
Other good places to search for data are government and professional organization websites. Examples are:
- Data.gov
- www.who.int
- cdc.gov
- www.diabetes.org
You can do a Google search to find data on a specific topic. For example, if we are looking for statistics on diversity in hiring, we could do a Google search for:
- site:.org diverse hiring data
- site:.gov diverse hiring data
This tells Google to only show us results where the website domain is .org or .gov. You would have to do two separate searches to view both sets of results.
It's important to ensure that you are using the most recent data that is available. Some data is available annually, but other data may only be collected every 5 or even 10 years, such as the Census.