Supporting_Scientific_Data
Supporting Scientific Data | A Guide for Researchers
| By John Borghi, PhD |  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9570-4163 |
This guide consists of a growing list of chapters, each covering a major topic in data management. These are complemented by a variety of explainers, checklists, and templates. In theory, these materials can all be read independently or in any order.
This guide is generally tool agnostic. Several sentences may be devoted to a certain popular spreadsheet program, but otherwise the focus is largely on practices and strategies.
When complete, this guide will consist of approximately 10 chapters. Below are those that are complete enough for public dissemination. There are also links to notes from the author, supplementary materials, and a glossary.
For the moment, even publicly available versions of all this are quite drafty. So please don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, suggestions, questions, and recriminations.
| Chapter | Description |
|---|---|
| Understanding data management | This chapter defines data management in both technical and functional terms. |
| Defining research data | Data is more than just an individual file or set of measurements. This chapter details how to understand all of the components of data as situated within a research workflow. |
| Planning for data management | This chapter deals with the development of documentation describing how data is to be managed over the course of a project. This includes data management and sharing plans (DMSPs) as well as documentation designed for internal use, such as standard operating procedures. |
| Documentation and description | If it is not documented, it did not happen. This chapter covers strategies and processes related to developing protocols, recording research workflow, and documenting the contents of specific data files. |
| Organization and Storage | This section details day-to-day strategies and processes related to ensuring that data and other research materials (documentation, code, physical samples, etc) can be found and used as needed. (Coming soon!) |
| Notes from the Author | Glossary | Supplementary Materials |
Each of the above chapters is built around a specific principle of Good Data Management Practice. See the links below for a full rundown.
| Good Data Management Practice | “Good Enough” Practices in Data Management |
Cite this project (and view archived releases): 
All chapters are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
If you’d like, you can view this project on Github.