LibGuides: Public Health: Data, Statistics, and Grey Literature

Below you will find links to a variety of sources for data and statistical information on the city, state, and country level, as well as international resources. A rescued and archived section collects federally-funded data, websites, and statistics that were deleted or altered after January 20, 2025. There are also some sources for grey literature -- research that is unpublished or published through non-commercial channels.

Google Dataset Search
Search engine for open data sets available on the Web.

New York City and State Data & Statistics

NYC Vital Statistics
EpiQuery: NYC Interactive Health Data

EpiQuery provides data on the health of New Yorkers from a variety of sources, including surveys, surveillance data, and vital records.
NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

More data resources from the NYC DOH.
NYC Community Health Profiles
NYC Health Data
InfoShare

Population statistics, immigration trends, socio-economic indicators, birth and death data, hospitalizations, local trade data, and more.

NYC Community Health Survey
Conducted annually, the CHS provides robust data on the health of New Yorkers, including neighborhood, borough, and citywide estimates on a broad range of chronic diseases and behavioral risk factors.
NYC Environment & Health Data Portal
Data and resources for researching how environments affect health. A project by the NYC DOH and Mental Hygiene’s Bureau of Environmental Surveillance and Policy.
NYC Open Data
Free public data published by NYC agencies and other partners.
NYC Food Policy Center: Foodscape Reports
NYC Foodscape Reports compile data and research in an accessible format to provide a community-level snapshot of neighborhoods' food environments. Reports are updated every six months by Hunter College's NYC Food Policy Center.
NY State Dept. of Health: Data & Reports
NY State Global Health Report
Presents weekly summaries of select ongoing and emerging infectious disease outbreaks of interest to public health professionals and the public, both globally and in the United States.

National Data & Statistics

America's Health Rankings
America’s Health Rankings provides analyses of national health on a state-by-state basis by evaluating a historical and comprehensive set of health, environmental and socioeconomic data to determine national health benchmarks and state rankings.
American Community Survey (ACS)
The ACS releases new data every year through a variety of data tables that you can access with different data tools.
Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)
Part of the CDC, the BRFSS collects data via telephone interviews in order to track health conditions and risk behaviors in the United States.
CDC National Center for Health Statistics
Access and download public-use data files and documentation from NCHS surveys and data collection systems.
CDC Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (Wonder)
CDC Wonder is a system that makes the information resources of the CDC available to public health professionals and the public at large. It provides access to a wide array of public health information.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Data Archive
Data and statistics made available by the CDC on a wide variety of health topics. Also contains links to other useful government websites.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
CMS is part of the Department of Health & Human Services and is the federal agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
City Health Dashboard
Provides an array of regularly updated data specific to neighborhood and/or city boundaries – such as life expectancy, park access, and children in poverty – to improve the community health. Created by the NYU Grossman School of Medicine's Department of Population Health with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Dashboard offers data on over forty measures of health and drivers of health for nearly one thousand cities across the U.S.
Congressional District Health Dashboard
Provides an array of actionable and nonpartisan data at the congressional district level, including life expectancy, diabetes rates, uninsurance, and children in poverty.
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
Explore health-related datasets & documentation -- search by state, county or zip code. Created and maintained by the U of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
Data.gov
Home of the U.S. Government's Open data.
Here you will find over 300,000 data sets, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
HealthData.gov
Website managed by the US Department of Health & Human Services which offers high-value data accessible to the public.
Health Resources & Services Information (HRSA) Data Warehouse
The HRSA Data Warehouse provides maps, data, and reports to the public. Our data integrates with external sources, such as the U.S. Census Bureau, providing information about HRSA’s grants, loan and scholarship programs, health centers and other public health programs and services.
The Kaiser Family Foundation
Kaiser is a non-profit organization focusing on national health issues, as well as the U.S. role in global health policy.
National Cancer Institute: Center for Biomedical Informatics & Information Technology
National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR)
Part of the National Library of Medicine
National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR)
Part of the CDC, the NPCR contains data collected by local cancer registries
OpenFEMA Data Sets
Racial Equity Dataset
Dataset includes state legislation enacted in 2021-22 related to the issue of racial equity. These laws are organized into categories of the social determinants of health, including subcategories. Created & maintained by The Network for Public Health Law.

Social Explorer This link opens in a new window
Social Explorer is dedicated to providing demographic information in an easily understood format: data maps. The database contains hundreds of interactive data maps of the United States. From Queens College.

Social Explorer Guide
Best practices & support for using Social Explorer. Includes a tab devoted to Public Health-related topics & usage.
State Health Facts
Contains more than 800 up-to-date health indicators at the state level can be mapped, ranked, and downloaded. Created and maintained by KFF.
US Census Bureau

Rescued and Archived Data

Abortion, Every Day
Jessica Valenti's substack is publishing and hosting CDC documents on reproductive rights issues, sexual health, intimate partner violence, health education, and more. These documents include guidelines, data, and statistics and were removed after January 20, 2025. You do not need to subscribe to this substack to download the files.
AHCJ Health Journalism Data
The Association of Health Care Journalists curated archive of statistics and trends relating to health care journalism.
data.restoredcdc.org
A--Z list of rescued CDC datasets. Archived on January 6, 2025 so does not include data on recent outbreaks. Organization of site is ongoing.
Restored CDC
Recreation of the pre-January 21, 2025 CDC website. Can be navigated like the original website. RestoredCDC is not affiliated with, endorsed by, approved by, or connected to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or any other government agency. This site does not represent itself as the CDC. For official CDC resources, visit www.cdc.gov.
CDC Archive.gov
Searchable repository of of every public-facing web page on the Centers for Disease Control website prior to purge.
CDC Datasets uploaded before 1/28/25
An archive of all CDC datasets uploaded to https://data.cdc.gov/browse before January 28th, 2025. Excludes corrupt datasets and data not publicly accessible.
Data.gov
A regularly updated mirror of all data files linked from data.gov.
Repository maintained by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab as part of their project to preserve U.S. federal public data.
DataLumos
An ICPSR archive for valuable government data resources. ICPSR has a long commitment to safekeeping and disseminating US government and other social science data. Contains public data purged from federal websites.
End of Term Archive
Captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The EOT has thus far preserved websites from administration changes in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.
Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition
Resources that identify and track steps taken by the Trump administration and Congress to scale back or eliminate access to federal government information. Provides links to groups performing data and website rescue. Created and maintained by the U of Minnesota Libraries.
Harvard Dataverse
A free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data.

International Data & Statistics

World Health Organization

Includes data from the Global Health Observatory (GHO), Global Health Estimates (GHE), and the WHO Mortality Database.
UN Data

Country/regional profiles and a variety of databases based on UN-collected- information.
Global Health Data Exchange

Comprehensive catalog of surveys, censuses, vital statistics, and other global health-related data.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)

IHME is an independent global health research center at the University of Washington
Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS)

The DHS Program has collected, analyzed, and disseminated data on population, health, HIV, and nutrition through more than 300 surveys in over 90 countries.

CIA World Fact Book
Provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities.
FAO Country Profiles
An information retrieval tool which groups the FAO's archive of information on its global activities in agriculture and development in a single area and catalogues it exclusively by country.
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
Explore data on sexual and reproductive health and population trends.
World Bank Open Data
Provides free and open access to global development data.
World Development Indicators
The WDI is the primary World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources. It presents the most current and accurate global development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates.
WHO Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Data Portal
Explore country profiles, indicators, and data from the World Health Organization.

NY Academy of Medicine

NY Academy of Medicine Data Sets
Contains links to national, international, local (NYC & NY State) & aging data sets recommended by Academy librarians.

Grey Literature

Grey Literature refers to research produced by organizations outside of traditional commercial publishing channels. This is material created outside of the traditional scholarly communications infrastructure (journals and commercial publishers) which can include dissertations, conference papers, white papers, reports, data -- all things that you won't find on databases like PubMed.

CUNY Academic Works
Searchable database including CUNY students' theses and dissertations. CUNY Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries.
Grey Literature in Health Research
A comprehensive guide to grey literature research in the health sciences from The Graduate Health & Life Sciences Research Library at Georgetown University Medical Center.
Grey Literature Report
Publications produced by the New York Academy of Medicine between 1999 - 2016, alerting readers to new grey literature publications in health services research and selected urban health topics.
GreyNet International
Founded in 1992, the goal of GreyNet is to facilitate dialog, research, and communication between persons and organizations in the field of grey literature. GreyNet further seeks to identify and distribute information on and about grey literature in networked environments.
Harvard Kennedy School: Think Tank
Provides a Google Custom Search of more than 1200 think tanks and research centers, both domestic and international. Includes a section on evaluating Think Tanks. No longer being updated as of 2/7/2025.
MedlinePlus Organization Directory
Collection of organizations & agencies providing health information.
medRxiv
Preprint server for the health sciences. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.
OpenGrey
Open Grey is a place to find grey literature on a variety of topics in European research.
Policy Coomon
The world's most comprehensive policy database, with over 17 million reports from 41,000 think tanks, agencies, governments, and cities. Must create a free account. Affiliated institution is City University of New York.

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I This link opens in a new window
Citation index to dissertations and theses. CCNY submissions can be viewed as full text
ProQuest Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Not just newspapers. Access dissertations, theses, conference papers, reports, working papers & websites.

PsyArXiv
A free preprint service for the psychological sciences. Maintained by The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science & powered by OSF preprints. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.
Science.gov
Science.gov is a gateway to U.S. government science information. The portal offers free access to research and development results and scientific and technical information from scientific organizations across 13 federal agencies.
SSRN
Devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of preprints and research papers and composed of a number of specialized research networks.
SSRN Guide
Guide to using SSRN from the U of Washington's School of Law library.
WorldCat
The world's largest library catalog, containing over 1.5 billion items. WorldCat.org is supported by OCLC, a nonprofit global library organization that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs so libraries can better fuel learning, research, and innovation.