The National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsors several archives about scientists and engineers, as well as considerable information pertaining to knowledge about and attitudes toward science and technology. Some of these sites have data available that can be analyzed online or downloaded into your computer. Others, such as Science and Engineering Indicators, have tables where you can extract data and enter it into spreadsheet programs such as Quattro Pro or EXCEL, or into the data spreadsheets of statistical programs such as SPSS.

However, there are data about many other areas besides scientists and engineers, and links to websites that have information about ALL major fields. For students of higher education, Web CASPAR also has considerable information about college and university funding.

Major NSF databases include:
 

This link will now forward to the National Center for Education Statistics.

WebCASPAR is a National Science Foundation database that examines the INSTITUTIONAL properties of colleges and universities. It has a host of demographic characteristics (e.g., percent female; number of degrees awarded to African-Americans), organizational qualities (e.g., student body size; size of faculty; average number of articles published by faculty), as well as more subjective ratings (e.g., the National Research Council ratings). While it has a focus on science and technology, it will also link you to information about students and/or faculty and/or funding in many other different fields. For example, sports administrators may want to check out information about general funding at a host of different universities.

With WebCASPAR, you can learn a great deal about one institution. You can also compare institutions on several characteristics. There's an online database management tool that allows you to select either the specific institutions that you want to examine or the type of institutions you want to examine (e.g., all Carnegie Research I universities).

SESTAT is a National Science Foundation database of INDIVIDUALS, not organizations. Several public use files are currently available.  These are datafiles which may have had minor changes to extreme scores so that individuals cannot be identified. A set of pre-defined tables for each database is also included for convenience.

The SESTAT Integrated Databases each contain records on over 100,000 college graduates with an education and/or occupation in a natural science, social or behavioral science or engineering field currently representing about 12 million scientists and engineers in the United States. These databases may be of particular interest to those studying math or science education.

Our Educational Psychology program is now part of the SESTAT database.

Also available is a database from the National Survey of College Graduates with records covering about millions of college graduates in the United States regardless of the degree field.

Again, you can create and run tables online. You can download tables too. If you feel you want to do more complex analysis, a CD is available from the NSF.

Every two years, the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation publishes Science and Engineering Indicators. This massive set of volumes, totally available online FREE (the last hard copy fwas printed in 2014) examines expenditures for science and techology, characteristics of the science and engineering workforce, issues in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education, academic research and development, issues in national and international industry, information technologies, and attitudes and understanding of science and technology.

A very detailed set of Appendix Tables accompanies each chapter. The tables are generally available in .pdf files using Adobe reader. The Appendix Tables actually comprise Volume 2 of Science and Engineering Indicators.

Thje current edition is 2016.

Other than Web CASPAR and SESTAT, most data described in this report are not easily available as online archives although several databases are archived at ICPSR (see http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/). Thus those who want to do trend analyses are advised to download particular chapters, then extract data from the tables as input to a spreadsheet or statistical analysis program.
 

 
 

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December 3 2017
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