When you are trying to locate statistical and numerical data, spending some time upfront familiarizing yourself with statistical resources and defining your need can save you a lot of time as it will help you determine what data sources are logical choices to consider consulting. The MSK Library’s Cancer Statistics LibGuide is a great place to start your search for statistics as it describes many cancer-related data resources and will help you become aware of your available options.
Here are three key questions you should ask to help define your data need:
- What form of data are you looking for? (Are you looking for summarized data or datasets that you plan to analyze yourself?)
- What geographical region are you interested in? (Are you interested in local, state, national, or international statistics?)
- How recent is the data you are looking for? (Are you looking for data from 10 years ago, 2 years ago, last year, or last month?)
The answers to these questions will help you to narrow down the potential sources that you should go looking into to find the data that you need. For example, if you were looking for some very recent (first quarter of this year) death rates for cancer in the United States and you were hoping to download the dataset as a CSV file for further analysis, your best bet would be to consult the “Vital Statistics Rapid Release” Quarterly Provisional Estimates put out by the National Center for Health Statistics. On the other hand, if you needed worldwide cancer mortality data, you would be better off looking to agencies like the World Heath Organization (WHO) or the International Agency for Research on Cancer, since they compile global data that can be analyzed online. Since compiling data from various countries is a large undertaking requiring international collaboration/coordination, however, the global data is compiled less frequently by the WHO and so would only be current to 2012.
Always keep in mind as you search for data that “statistics are collected to meet the needs of the collector”. Different data collection agencies/organizations will focus on what matters most to them and operate differently according to their mission and available funding. Looking at the technical notes provided with the statistics/datasets is necessary in order to understand how the data collection was carried out for it will definitely vary from data source to data source.
Feel free to ask us at the MSK Library for help in your search for statistics and numerical data.