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Vocational Education and Training

Finding government reports (including reports containing statistics)

I know, I know, we told you not to use Google for your assignments

However, Google has some great features for searching for government reports, policies, statistics and other useful documents. (But please do not rely on using Google for all your references.)

  • Use technical or professional terms to get more technical or professional results. For example, when looking for disease statistics, use incidence rather than numbers or statistics (or maybe prevalence might be more relevant).
  • Use (double) quotation marks to define phrases (multiple words found together, rather than separately) - use "whooping cough" to find the exact phrase rather then whooping cough (which might find he started to cough after whooping for joy).
  • Add site:gov.au to restrict results to only government websites.

incidence "whooping cough" site:gov.au

Try it in Google

 

You can also:

  • use site:vic.gov.au to restrict to Victorian government web sites.
  • use a year range to look for years in the results, such as daterange:2012-2015
  • specify the filetype of results (such as only PDF documents).

incidence "whooping cough" site:vic.gov.au daterange:2014-2016 filetype:PDF

Try it:  

You can also use parentheses (round brackets) and OR for alternative terms (works best at the end of the search line):

incidence site:vic.gov.au daterange:2014-2016 filetype:PDF ("whooping cough" OR pertussis)

Try it:  

Remember about using professional or technical terms to find professional results? Try leaving out whooping cough and only searching for the medical term for the condition, pertussis.

incidence site:vic.gov.au daterange:2014-2016 filetype:PDF pertussis

Try it:  

We can also exclude a search term from our results (similar to using NOT in a database) by putting a hyphen or minus sign in front of the word (or phrase in quotes). For example, to exclude results that include the word Melbourne, we can use -Melbourne

incidence site:vic.gov.au daterange:2014-2016 filetype:PDF pertussis -Melbourne

Try it:  

 

Warning: excluding results that have the word Melbourne will also exclude results that have Melbourne and rural details, or Melbourne and your area of interest.

This might not be what you want.

Finding Australian statistics

Want some overall Australian statistics?

Want some statistics for your local town, suburb, or other area?

Other sources of statistical data:

  • NCVER Research and Statistics: published research and statistical reports, data collections, surveys and visualisations on the Australian vocational education and training system.
  • Labour market insights: online resource from the Department of Education, Skills and Employment that brings together data, reports and insights to help you better understand your local labour market.
  • Data.gov.au: central source of Australian open government data.
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