UN Millennium Development Goals e-learning materials

Searching ESDS International Data portfolio

The ESDS Data Catalogue is an integrated catalogue which contains information on over 5,000 datasets covering an extensive range of key economic and social data, both quantitative and qualitative, spanning many disciplines and themes. The entire catalogue can be searched on the Economic and Social Data Services website.

However, if you only interested in finding international data, you can choose to search only the ESDS International data portfolio.  To do this go to the ESDS International website and click on the Data tab at the top of the screen followed by the Search international datasets option in the side navigation bar.

In this activity, you will search for data on a key topic within the UN MDGs – Maternal Mortality in Africa in the international data portfolio.

Step 1: Type in your search term

Firstly type in Maternal Mortality in the search input box and click GO. You will probably be shown a message saying no results have been found. This does not necessarily mean there is no relevant data, but rather that you should broaden your search terms.

Step 2: Broaden your search

If you then type Health in the search input box as shown in the screen shot below, you will see a list of all international databases, both macro and micro that include health as a keyword or have health in the description text of the database.  However, as health is such a broad term you will receive over 90 different ‘hits’ which is far too many to scroll through.

Step 3: Narrow your search

To narrow the search again, type Health Women South Africa in the search input box and click the Macro (aggregate data) check box. There should be only one result displayed, the UN Common Database.

You can then click on this database record to view the full database description which includes topics covered, periodicity and geographical coverage, methodology information and details on how to access the data.

Searching tips:

• use double quotes for an exact phrase search, e.g. "direction of trade"
• use an asterisk, e.g. research* to find researcher, researching, researches, or researched
• '?' wildcards are supported, e.g. teach??? to find teaching or teachers
• searches are case insensitive

The subject terms currently included in the catalogue are at a very broad level. For example, at the time of writing this activity a search on ‘health’ returns over 90 records, but a search on  'maternal mortality' returns no datasets even though the UN Common Database does contain this information (this may change in the future as metadata creation improves).  So, if you cannot find the data you are looking for, don’t assume the data is not there, but try and think of a broader term which it may be catagorised as.  If you still cannot find the data you require, contact the ESDS International Team at international@esds.ac.uk and they will carry out a search for you and if the data is not available in the ESDS International data portfolio, they may be able to point you in the right direction!

As well as improving the underlying metadata on the search catalogue records, ESDS International also intends to allow users to further narrow searches to either macro (data aggregated to a country level) or micro (individual, survey level data) data.