Polls & Statistics

There are so many polls out there, conducted by different organizations on different issues.  Where can I go if I need to find a poll result, like, how many Americans support stem cell research, etc?  Also what about general statistics, like the U.S.’s ranking in the world in terms of research facilities, or whatever?

Personally, I would say that, depending on the statistic/poll query you seek, you may not be able to find an all-encompassing source that addresses every topic, all in one handy location.  There are, of course, some big-name places that are likely to have looked at a lot of the hot topics.  I started out with the specific examples offered – stem cell research and ranking in research facilities.

Stem Cell Research

Googling poll opinion and “stem cell” brought me to a 2004 Harris Poll and a 2005 News report on stem cell research opinions.  Harris Interactive Polls in general seems to have a lot of data, but the search function is pretty weak: I can’t tell the date from the results list, there’s no option to sort your search by date – you can browse by year, but there seems to be no combination of the search features.  Furthermore, searching will give you Poll and News results, but the two categories don’t have the same browsing spans.  Browsing is for more recent years only, though results from earlier may be posted. 
Conclusion: If recency isn’t a pressing issue, then Harris would be okay, but it’s not the most convenient.

Much more navigable, by comparison, is the Polling Report. They address issues primarily from a political viewpoint, it seems, but a summary list of 22 polls from 2001-2008 (mostly from a handful of the same sources, but over time) on stem cell research opinions links from the Issues section on the main page. Something that Harris offered that Polling Report does not, however, is analysis (well, there’s a “News & Analysis” section, but it’s just links to other news sites and doesn’t appear to be searchable). Polling Report is fairly bare bones – the source, date, question, and response percentages. Looking into the Issues section further, it seems that stem cell research really falls under the category of Science & Nature under “American Scene” – a barely noticeable navigation option in the site directory, on the left-hand side of the main page.
Conclusion: It’s a kind of busy and confusing layout, but still more straight-forward and browsable than Harris.

Pew Research Center is a very reputable source for polling data and it offers some in-depth analyses along with straight-up percentage reports. One example of the combination is the 2005 Political Typology report. You can browse by the tabs at the top and read the whole report (with a few sentences analyzing this particular issue) in addition to viewing the percentage breakdown by respondent type for issue questions. Pew is a complicated site, with different publication sections, like the Reports (stem cell sample), Analysis & Commentary, News Stories, and Event Transcripts/Interviews. There are also assorted Project Centers which address topics from different aspects, like the Pew Research Center for People & the Press (where a lot of public opinion stuff can be found), Pew Internet & American Life Project (where I look for most of my Internet-related stats, personally), Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (stem cell sample), Pew Global Attitudes Project, and Social & Demographic Trends, as well as a couple others that aren’t necessarily pertinent to this question. Additionally, there’s an advanced search function which will let you search with Boolean operators (AND, OR), phrases in quotation marks, and specify which project section of the Pew sites to search, to narrow things down.
Conclusion: A versatile and fairly handy source for a broad range of topics.

I’m going to throw in Public Agenda, too, as a site that manages to display data in plain speech pretty well, dates is results list, & both searches and browses fairly easily. Plus: Pie Charts!
Conclusion: Plain language is user-friendly, as are easy-to-follow graphics. Throw in solid data and this is a decent source for summary information and visual representations.

Ranking in Research Facilities
This one was a bit trickier. “Stem cell research” doesn’t have too many variations and it falls pretty clearly under a few categories (“medicine” and/or “science” and “morality” and/or “religion”, primarily). The concept of “research facilities” may also be referred to as “research institutes”, “research output”, “scientific citations”, etc. and may fall indistinctly and erratically under categories like “education”, “science”, “technology”, “medicine”, “environment”, and “industry”… or not.
Googling statistics world ranking research, alternating plain “research” with “research institutes” and “research facilities” to start, gives me some potentially starting points, but few of the initial results seem to be as obviously pertinent as those in the stem cell research opinion polls search.

NationMaster looks like a nice all-purpose site, but while it covers quite a few specific angles on a wide array of topics, it doesn’t really seem to look specifically at who has the most or best research facilities. The closest we come is “Education statistics > Scientific and technical journal articles (most recent) by country”. In this category, the U.S. has ranked #1 from 1981-2003 (the latest date offered in this particular statistic).
Conclusion: If what you’re looking for is what NationMaster has done a study on, congratulations. Otherwise, you’ll have to keep looking…

Another result that cropped up was the Webometrics Ranking Web of World R&D Centers. The site says that “[t]he original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web publication, not to rank institutions… However web indicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are not based on number of visits or page design but global performance and visibility”. The criteria for ranking, particularly for Research Output (Rich Files and Google Scholar citations) seems a little… weak, to me. I wouldn’t want to depend wholly or even primarily on web publishing as the means by which I assess research output, even as digital publication continues to gain ground.
Conclusion: An interesting way of looking at the citation production of various institutes, but not necessarily the most complete assessment.

Having browsed a bit through fairly indirect or outright fruitless results, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s going to be citations that reveal the research rankings (though most of the results so far seem to focus on universities as the sole type of research facility), so I change my search query to world citation ranking. This leads me to an article talking about the top research universities of America, which mentions Science Watch as having done a study using “citation impact to assess… scientific performance”. This sounds promising, so I find the Science Watch website.

Data & Rankings is a prominent navigation bar, with a subcategory titled “Country Profiles”. Following that link, I’m a bit disappointed to see the site doesn’t seem to offer a complete profile for every country, but rather spotlights a certain country each month. However, the Featured Country articles list is peppered with articles about the Top 20 Countries in Clinical Medicine, Geoscience, and Physics and the Top 10 Countries in Chemistry. A little narrower than the initial inquiry, but more specific doesn’t necessarily hurt. I browse onward to find that older data (2001-January 2008) is available, through the Archives link in the sidebar. A few locations for archives are listed, but for world research rankings you want in-cites’ Countries section.
Conclusion: It looks like this is the site to address this particular aspect of your question (research and world rankings) best, but it might not suit broader topics.

“General statistics”-wise, it really does depend on what types of statistics you’re looking for. Military? Technology? Economy? Gender equity? Political? Entertainment? Environmental? Other..? Some of these coincide (ex. CIA World Factbook, NationMaster, U.S. Census Bureau, United Nations Statistics Division, and GeoHive) and some you’d be better off focusing on developing a narrower search strategy to find specialized databases/resources.

Does this answer your question? Do you have any further questions?

Tags: citations, opinion polls, polls, research, research facilities, statistics, stem cell research, world rankings