Best practices

The Research Data Management Training, or MANTRA project has produced an open, online training course for PhD and early career researchers to learn best practices in data management.

In addition to the interactive, online module which covers data management topics such as Organising Your Data, there are downloadable software modules covering data handling skills in SPSS, R, NVivo and ArcGIS.

The resource was created by EDINA and Data Library, University of Edinburgh, and was funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme.

The Irish Qualitative Data Archive: Best Practice in Archiving Qualitative Data (PDF) handbook is intended to introduce the researcher and data curator to the issues they need to consider when developing an archiving strategy appropriate to their qualitative data set. The guidelines apply principally to textual data that have been generated in qualitative research projects.

UCSD Research Cyberinfrastructure: Data Management Planning contains resources, examples, and links to guides on writing a data management plan. Strong National Science Foundation (NSF) focus.

The UK Data Archive's guide Managing and Sharing Data: Best Practice for Researchers (PDF) provides guidance to support researchers in producing high quality research data that can be shared and re-used beyond the primary research. The guidance covers:

• Why and how to share research data
• Data management planning and costing
• Documenting data
• Formatting data
• Storing data and data security
• Ethics and consent for data sharing and re-use
• Data copyright
• Data management strategies for large investments

UK Data Archive: Create and Manage Data provides best practice guidance for researchers on creating and managing data. Guidance covers data management and sharing planning, consent and ethics in data sharing, data ownership and copyright, documenting data, formatting data, storing data, data security and data management strategies for large-scale research investments.

The MIT Libraries Data Management and Publishing guide is aimed to provide academic researchers with practical tips for research data management. Includes guidance on a range of topics, covering both managing data during a project and sharing/archiving data upon completion. Includes page on developing data management plans.

The Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2) maintains projects and research for facilitating data curation. Includes an extensive list of data repositories that is searchable and browsable.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory DAAC: Data Provider Information outlines practices that data collectors and providers should follow to improve the usability of environmental data sets. Contains manual on Best Practices for Preparing Environmental Data Sets to Share and Archive (PDF).

The Digital Curation Centre is a hub of expertise in curating digital research data. It sponsors events, projects, and fora for communication, and maintains an extensive set of online resources, including its Curation Reference Manual. Includes page on data management plans which outlines UK research funder data planning and sharing policies.

The ICPSR Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving (PDF) guides researchers through best practices in preparing their research data for sharing. Chapters cover activities to be undertaken at various stages throughout the research lifecycle.