Local data at a national scale: Introducing a dataset of official municipal websites in the United States for text-based analytics

Abstract

Municipal websites serve as central platforms for local governments to share information with the public. They offer authoritative, up-to-date, and free access for researchers to collect city-level data. However, until now, a comprehensive and accurate database of municipal web addresses did not exist. Here, we introduce a complete and manually verified dataset containing information on whether a municipality has an official website and, if so, what its web address is, of all 19,518 municipalities in the United States. With this dataset, researchers can easily conduct systematic searches on municipal official websites for self-defined keywords. The search results are well-suited for text-based analytics. This new data source benefits urban scholars who struggle to access high-quality local data for nationwide studies and contributes to narrowing the data gap.