Library Guides: Data Resources in the Health Sciences: Scientific Data

Types of Scientific Data Resources

You can find scientific research data wherever it's been shared. In addition to the traditional publication of data as part of a peer-reviewed research article, scientific research data may be:

Published on a journal website as "supplemental data" (tables or figures) accompanying, but not embedded in, a research article.
- Examples: Journal of Immunology, Journal of Biological Chemistry, and Nature Medicine.
Published in a new type of journal focused on describing and sharing complete data sets and protocols.
- Examples: Dataset Papers in Biology and BMC Research Notes.
Deposited in an institutional repository or in a discipline-specific repository. Deposits may be voluntary or required by a journal or funding agency.
- Examples: Gene Expression Omnibus, Protein Data Bank, and the Electron Microscopy Data Bank.
Submitted to a curated discipline-specific resource that reviews, collates, and integrates data from multiple sources.
- Examples: Mouse Phenome Database, Database of Genomics Variants, and NCBI's Gene database.
Published by federal statistics agencies and government research groups.
- Example: the ResearchDataGov web portal.

Find Biomedical Sciences Data by Subject

Find selected discipline-specific repositories and curated scientific databases organized by subject.

Finding Biomedical Sciences Data Repositories: Portals and Catalogs

National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) resources
o Portal to a premier site for integrated biomedical and genomic databases and tools (e.g., BLAST).
o Examples include EntrezGene, OMIM, PubChem, Epigenomics, and SNP databases.
EMBL-EBI Molecular Databases and Bioinformatics Services
o Portal to the highly regarded scientific databases and computational biology tools hosted by The European Bioinformatics Institute.
o Examples include UniProt (Universal Protein Resource), Ensembl, and Reactome pathways database.
ExPASy (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)
Portal to scientific databases and software tools in fields including proteomics, genomics, transcriptomics, systems biology, population genetics, and phylogeny/evolution.
NIH Data Sharing Repositories
o Search this list of NIH-supported data repositories by type of data or by NIH Institute/Center.
o Examples include Neuroscience Information Framework, PeptideAtlas, QTL Archive, and the Cell Centered database.
Recommended Data Repositories (Nature's Scientific Data)
re3data.org Biology Repositories
o Directory of research data repositories in the biological sciences.
o Examples include FlyBase, GWAS Central, Protein Data Bank, and the Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank.
re3data.org Medical Repositories
o Directory of research data repositories in the health and medical sciences.
o Examples include DrugBank, VectorBase, the Immuno Polymorphism database, and Cancer Genome Mine.
BioSharing (BioMedCentral)
o Catalog of biological databases described according to the BioDBcore guidelines.
o Examples include Aptamer Base, Comparative Toxicogenomics Database, ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements), and FungiDB.
Nucleic Acids Research Molecular Biology Database Collection (Oxford University Press)
Lists 1512 online databases as of January 2013.
Biological Information Resource (University of Washington)
Directory of sequence databases and search and analysis tools
International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility
Pointers to neuroscience resources
Pathguide: the Pathway Resource List
Biological pathway and molecular interaction resources
ORBIT: Online Registry of Biomedical Informatics Tools (NLM)
Registry for informatics software, knowledge bases, data sets and design resources
Online Bioinformatics Resources Collection (University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library)
Searchable database of annotations and links for over 2800 bioinformatics databases and software tools.