BLS
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the official US figures on consumer and producer prices, employment, unemployment, earnings and productivity. Through ScholarMuse, an agent can pick from a short list of headline national series with find_series, or fetch any BLS series by its series id with get_series, for example LNS14000000 for the unemployment rate.
ScholarMuse tools: find_series, get_series. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from BLS.
find_series
Searches a fixed list of 17 US national series kept in the connector, not the full BLS database. BLS is skipped when the query names a country other than the US.
- seriesId
- e.g. bls:LNS14000000
- title
- Series title from the built-in list
- frequency
- Monthly or Quarterly
- units
- Units, e.g. Index 1982-84=100 or Percent
- geography
- Always United States
get_series
For a series outside the built-in list, the title is just the series id and units and geography are missing.
- seriesId
- The BLS series id that was fetched
- title
- Series title, when the series is in the list
- units
- Units, when the series is in the list
- frequency
- Monthly, Quarterly or Annual
- geography
- United States, when the series is in the list
- start
- First period returned
- end
- Last period returned
- count
- Number of observations returned
- observations
- List of period and value pairs
What it covers
- find_series knows 17 headline US series, among them CPI-U all items (CUUR0000SA0), core CPI, PPI final demand (WPUFD4), the unemployment rate (LNS14000000), U-6, nonfarm payrolls (CES0000000001), average hourly earnings, JOLTS job openings, productivity and the Employment Cost Index.
- get_series accepts any BLS series id, so state, metro area or industry series work if you already know the id.
- Monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual periods are read. The built-in series are monthly, except productivity and the Employment Cost Index, which are quarterly.
Limits
- There is no keyword search over BLS. Anything outside the 17 built-in series has to be requested by its exact series id.
- Without start, a call returns the last 10 years (20 with a key). One call reaches back at most three such windows, so 30 or 60 years; ask for earlier data with start and end.
- Annual-average rows that BLS adds to monthly and quarterly series are left out.
- One series per call, with no country parameter: the data is for the United States.
How ScholarMuse reaches BLS
The connector posts to the BLS Public Data API timeseries endpoint directly. It uses version 2 with a registration key when ScholarMuse has one configured, and version 1 with no key otherwise. find_series makes no request to BLS, because BLS has no search endpoint.
Responses are cached for up to 12 hours, so a figure released this morning can take that long to appear.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: Public domain (US Government work)
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov). BLS.gov cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after retrieval.
Records that come from BLS carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow BLS's own citation guidance.
