FRED
FRED is the economic data service of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It republishes time series from many national and international providers, and it holds series for countries other than the US as well. Through ScholarMuse, an agent can search FRED by keyword with find_series and fetch the observations of one series by its FRED id with get_series.
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 FRED.
find_series
Candidates from FRED's own keyword search, at most 8 per call. The country name stays in the query because FRED has a separate series for each country.
- seriesId
- Id to pass to get_series, e.g. fred:UNRATE
- title
- Series title as published by FRED
- frequency
- Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly or Annual
- units
- Units plus seasonal adjustment
- coverageStart
- Date of the first observation
- coverageEnd
- Date of the latest observation
- popularity
- FRED popularity score of the series
- rights
- Warning when the series notes mention copyright
get_series
FRED series carry no geography field; the place is part of the title.
- seriesId
- The series id that was fetched
- title
- Series title
- units
- Units plus seasonal adjustment
- frequency
- Publication frequency
- lastUpdated
- When FRED last updated the series
- rights
- Warning when the series notes mention copyright
- start
- Date of the first returned observation
- end
- Date of the last returned observation
- count
- Number of observations returned
- truncated
- True when only the latest 2,000 points are returned
- observations
- List of date and numeric value pairs
What it covers
- Any series in FRED can be fetched by its id, for example UNRATE or DGS10. The id is not case sensitive.
- Frequency is whatever FRED publishes for that series, from daily market rates to annual figures.
- Search is FRED's own full-text search, so the query can name a country, a concept or a release.
Limits
- One series per get_series call, and at most the 2,000 most recent observations. For long daily series, set start and end.
- There is no country parameter for FRED. Each country has its own series id, so name the country when you search.
- Only series search, series metadata and observations are called. Release calendars, category browsing and earlier vintages of a series are not available.
- Missing values are dropped, and some series are copyrighted by their original providers; check the rights field before reuse.
How ScholarMuse reaches FRED
The connector calls the FRED API directly: series/search for find_series, then series and series/observations for get_series. FRED requires an API key on every request, so ScholarMuse sends its own key; without that key the FRED part of both tools returns an error.
Observations are cached for up to 1 hour, search results for 12 hours and series titles and units for 1 day.
API key: the upstream API needs one; ScholarMuse uses its own, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: FRED API Terms of Use (some series are copyrighted by their original providers)
Source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (fred.stlouisfed.org). This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Records that come from FRED carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow FRED's own citation guidance.
