Are you looking for biomedical datasets to use in your research or for educational purposes? Consider checking out the Dataset Catalog beta, a new online tool created by the NIH’s National Library of Medicine. The beta version of this tool was recently launched and is ready for exploration. The Dataset Catalog is modeled after PubMed, providing access and discovery of datasets through a federated web search of specific publicly available repositories.
Currently, the catalog contains close to 90,000 datasets from 4 repositories including dbGap, Dryad, ImmPort, and Harvard Dataverse. There is a handy guide to help you use the catalog to find datasets relevant to your research. You can search with keywords and phrases, as well as the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, and parenthesis (). For example, (kidney transplantation) AND (anti-rejection OR immunosuppress*). You can filter search results by Repository, Time Frame, and MeSH terms. If you click on the dataset title, you will go to the full citation for that dataset, including the link to the dataset in its source Repository, and any links to associated publications.
The beta version aims to collect user feedback so the tool can be improved, so give it a try, and let NIH know how it is working!