During Your Research
Resources can help you manage your data while conducting research, so that you can collect and safeguard your data and your research team stays organized.
Benefits to Researchers
Managing data during the active phase of research can:
- Save you time (now and later)
- Keep you organized for your own work
- Ensure continuity among members of the research team (who may come and go)
- Ease data sharing later if required
Collecting Data
- Consult the guides to collecting data and ensuring data quality in life sciences (ELIXIR)
- Consider reusing data. A wealth of data is already available in existing biological and biomedical science data repositories. Consult:
- NIH's Data Discovery Platform, NCBI resources, and its supported repositories
- Global lists of repositories in biology, medicine, and OMICS
- Consult your institutional library (for subject resources and custom advice from librarians)
Storing and Organizing Data
- Consult your institutional computing services and shared core resource facility (for available systems for storage, backup, data protection, and analysis capabilities)
- Ensure data is backed up with multiple distributed copies
- Consult the ELIXIR considerations for data storage in life sciences
- For sensitive and/or human subject data:
- Follow community and institutional guidelines on storing sensitive or human and clinical data, including determining risk level, and preserving sensitive data safely
- If working with genomic data, consult the NIH guide to Using Genomic Data Responsibly
- Deliberately organize and name your files
- Use community standards for metadata and file formats:
- Consult your institutional computing services, shared core resource facility, and/or library for advice
- Use best practices for managing specific domains of life science data
- Ensure, whenever possible, that at least one version of all your data files is in an open, interoperable, non-proprietary format
- Consider the benefits of using Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN)
- See if your institution subscribes to any ELNs
- Compare options using the ELN Comparison Matrix
- When staff join or leave the research project, use onboarding and offboarding checklists to ensure continuity
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