Search Discovery @ CSU by keyword for titles in the Michael Schwartz Library at CSU. Use the drop-down options in the search bar to narrow your search to books & media, or expand your search to include titles that can be requested from other OhioLINK libraries.

Statistics are collected to meet the needs of the collector. 

When mining online for data, consider how and why it was collected, where it comes from, and how it is presented. 

Who are the collectors?

• Government agencies and entities who are required by law to make the data they collect freely accessible to the public
• Organizations whose mission is to enhance transparency in health care policy development and decision-making

Other parties (such as City-Data.com) aggregate free data online and use advertising algorithms in search engines to make their websites easily discoverable. That makes data on these sites easy to find via Google. For authoritative information in context, researchers should always seek the original source!

There are MANY free public health data resources! A few are listed below. Schedule a research appointment to explore more data tools and sites.

Definition and Considerations:

An impact factor is a quantitative measure of the importance of a journal, article, or researcher (author) relative to others in the same discipline, based on how frequently it is cited. There are several indexes that measure impact factors, but they do not use the same methodologies. This means they produce slightly different results. Therefore, you should use these data carefully. There are some controversial aspects of using impact factors:

• It's not clear whether the number of times a paper is cited measures its actual quality. Sometimes research is cited as a bad example of something.
• Some impact factor calculations include citations in textbooks, handbooks, and reference books, while others do not.
• Some disciplines have many subject-specific journals, while others have very few. One should only compare journals and researchers within the same discipline.
• Review articles are cited more often and can skew results.
• Self-citing can skew results.

Adapted from University of Washington Health Sciences Library guide on impact factors: https://guides.lib.uw.edu/hsl/impactfactors

Citation Metrics and Impact Factor Resources: