The main sources of CSDB data are:
* Scientific publications indexed in the dedicated citation databases, including [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ NCBI Pubmed] and [http://webofknowledge.com/ Thomson Reuters Web Of Science] (approx. 18000 records).
* CCSD (Carbbank ) database (approx. 3000 records).
The data are selected and added to CSDB manually by browsing original scientific publications. The data originating from other databases are subject to error-correction and approval procedures.
As of 2017, the coverage on bacteria and archaea is ca. 80% of carbohydrate structures published in scientific literature  The time lag between the publication of relative data and their deposition into CSDB is about 18 months. Plants are covered up to 1997, and fungi up to 2012.
CSDB does not cover data from the animalia domain, except unicellular metazoa. There is a number of dedicated databases on animal carbohydrates, e.g. [http://www.unicarbkb.org/ UniCarbKB]  or [http://glycosciences.de GLYCOSCIENCES.de] .
CSDB is reported as one of the biggest projects in glycoinformatics. It is employed in structural studies of natural carbohydrates and in glyco-profiling.
The content of CSDB has been used as a data source in other glycoinformatics projects.