Doing academic and personal research almost exclusively online these days has led me to discover some very valuable indexes, databases, and statistic repositories that anyone with even the slightest curiosity or need for such information should bookmark. Spending time on these sites can be addictive, depressing, encouraging, or enlightening depending on your state of mind. I would recommend trying them, however, as your research may not be complete without them.
Top Online Research Sites to Check Out
Whether you work in an intelligence position, or you just need to dig a little deeper on a topic, it’s good idea to have good tools to conduct your research. Here are a few sites to check out.
1. FACA Database
This is probably my favorite. I kind of knew by the number of times I read or heard “an advisory committee on (insert some policy or legal subject)”, that there was a multitude of advisory boards, committees, working groups, tied into the federal government. What I did not know is that this number averages somewhere near 1,000, according to the site.
DoD alone has 39 advisory boards ranging from such things as Armed Forces Retirement Home Advisory Council (might need to look at that soon) to the Defense Innovation Board (somewhat well known) to finally the Education for Seapower Advisory Board (anchors aweigh). However DoD isn’t close to the King Kong of these such groups. That title would go to Health and Human Services sitting at 256 boards and committees with the Department of Agriculture a distant second at 137, many of which are regional resource advisory committees. By clicking on the far left column next to the name of the committee, you can find all sorts of information, including the POC, website, date chartered and what act or law gave authority to form the committee. In addition, you can find a large amount of records from past meetings, advisory reports and sub committees that are linked. If you are looking for bureaucracy’s inner workings, you will feel like you won the lottery.
2. Statista
This German-based company has charts, graphs, spreadsheets and raw data on about every imaginable subject from number of TikTok users to Cyber Crime in India to the U.S. import value of bananas by country. The basic tier is free which allows for overall data and trends without detailed analysis. Academic partners and some libraries have access to the Starter Account (valued at $79.00 per month) and both government and federal employees may have a similar no-cost option. The best part of Statista is that it is mostly unfiltered, mostly raw data that you can draw your own conclusions from, without the spin or influence coming from someone using it as a source.
3. CommonCrawl
This site is not for the faint of heart or researchers with very little patience. It is managed by AWS and recently crawled 3.15 billion pages on the internet. You can find information one of two ways: the first is to install an open source program using command line functions and Python to be able to build your own custom datasets. The other option, although more restrictive, Common Crawl Data Sets has almost various data sets that are open or usable with permission Available Data Sets.
If nothing else, it is fascinating to see what types of data is important to what professions and how it is used.
