Guides

Practical, free guides to working with FDA's public data. Each one shows the free route first.

• How to Download FDA Recall Data (Drugs, Devices and Food): A Practical Guide
  Three free ways to download FDA recall and enforcement report data, what each one includes, and the gotchas that trip people up.
• FDA 510(k) Data in Python: Pull, Clean and Analyse Clearances
  A working pandas walkthrough for 510(k) clearance data from openFDA, including joining device classification and charting clearances by product code.
• openFDA Enforcement Report API Pagination: Getting Past the Skip Limit
  Why openFDA pagination stops returning results, and three reliable ways to pull every enforcement record (search_after, date windows, bulk files).
• Drug Shortage Data History: Where to Find It and How to Track It Over Time
  The public sources for US drug shortage data, what openFDA's drug shortages endpoint contains, and how to build a history when the source only shows current state.
• How to Track Weekly Changes in FDA Enforcement Reports
  openFDA overwrites enforcement records in place. Here's how to snapshot, diff and report what changed each week, with pandas code.