Organisation and Documentation
You may have planned your data management strategy down to the last detail and cleared all of the ethical issues and intellectual property rights, but if you don’t organise your data properly on a day-to-day basis, there is always a risk that you won’t be able to find things when you need them. Likewise, if you don’t document your data, you may not be able to understand why exactly you recorded what you did, or how your data was derived when you come back to it in future. If you are planning on sharing your data at any point, then documentation is especially important.
Organising your data
- Consider how you will be able to retrieve relevant information when you need it.
- Think about your file structure – will it still serve its purpose five years from now?
- Ensure that related items are linked to one another in some manner, e.g. notes are linked to sources.
- Add tags or keywords to files if you think this might help you to find them more easily in future. This can help avoid situations where image or audio files, for instance, are scattered across your computer with no means for you to search for them
- If you work on more than one machine, ensure your files remain synchronised
- Take a look at the software and web services available to you. Ensure you are using the most appropriate tools for structuring the information you are gathering
For further help on tools and methods for organising your data, see the University of Oxford’s Research Skills Toolkit . Training on the use of specific software tools (and in skills such as database design) is offered by OUCS’s IT Learning Programme
Documenting your data
‘Metadata’ is the term that librarians and data managers use to refer to data about data. Metadata can include, for instance, information about the author of an article, or creator of a dataset, or the date when something was published.
You should record some basic metadata about any structured data you assemble, so that it can continue to be understood in future. Ensure that:
- your data can be cited, if needs be (e.g. author, title, date(s) of creation, where the data can be found if it has been published in any form); your data can be verified if you have used any experimental methods to create it (e.g. processes used, parameters of any machinery involved, the hardware and software involved);
- people will be able to understand why you gathered or selected the data that you did (e.g. what was the purpose of the data, why did you include or omit particular fields, are there any anomalies that may need explaining?);
- if there are any intellectual property issues or restrictions to access the data, these are clearly indicated.
Bibliographic data is also a type of metadata. You should keep track of all the books and articles you read and refer to, using bibliographic software if you find that this helps (see the University of Oxford’s Research Skills Toolkit
Read more about documenting your data at the UK Data Archives pages on Metadata and Documentation
Keeping Laboratory Notebooks
Laboratory notebooks can play an important role in supporting claims relating to intellectual property developed by University researchers, and in a number of other areas (such as the demonstration of adherence to standards of good practice, academic and ethical integrity, and compliance with contractual provisions permitting sponsors to audit work carried out in pursuit of sponsored-research).
Visit the 'Keeping Laboratory Notebooks' page for more guidelines, highlighting the importance of accurate, up-to-date and properly corroborated laboratory notebooks. The guidelines are based largely on existing policy in research intensive universities in the US (specifically Yale, Stanford and Cornell).