The best place to find research data for your subject area is a discipline-specific repository.
Sometimes this is called a subject-specific repository.
This is a repository that holds content specialising in your research discipline.
It will be attuned to your area: specific, narrow, authoritative and will have an expert focus.
It's expert authority is its strength for many researchers will know to look here for data in your area.
It is also potentially a very strong place for you to share data at the end of the project (unless you have a funder requirement that data must be shared elsewhere).
For some researchers the discipline-specific repository for your area may be obivous. For example:
In such a case it is best to use the following general resources to identify which repositories exist for your research area and discipline, more generally:
Re3data is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It includes repositories that enable permanent storage of and access to data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers, and scholarly institutions. re3data promotes a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data.
FAIRsharing.org is a curated resource that provides information about data and metadata standards, databases, and data policies. It's a community-driven resource that helps users discover and share resources.
It offers a catalogue of:
FAIRsharing has a growing community of users, including researchers, developers, and publishers, interested in identifying relevant standards and their status and use in databases.
Biosciences
Chemistry
Engineering
Geosciences
Health & Medicine
Material Science
Physics (including Astrophysics & Astronomy)
Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary or general data repositories are collections of research data that span multiple disciplines and are not focused on a specific subject. Examples include Dryad, figshare, and Open Science Framework.
Examples of interdisciplinary data repositories