If Nature News and Comment are writing about it, it must be the next big thing eh?
“Data management is inevitably going to be an essential skill in the open-science era." https://t.co/SrjnAW46na
— Nature News & Comment (@NatureNews) 15 March 2018
Hot topic or not managing your data properly is super important for scientific/commercial integrity, and most importantly, your own sanity. It’s so important that my department invited their most bestest PhD student to give a talk on it at our last training day.
If you couldn’t be bothered to flick through all ten slides then here are said Golden Rules, according to yours truly:
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Don’t Touch the Raw Data - back it up and keep read-only copy.
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Have a plan! - Decide where your data is going to be stored, what its called, when/if it needs to be deleted BEFORE you start collecting it.
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Document Everything - You know who the worst person at replying to emails is about what the sampling frequency of channel X was. Nope not him, it actually yourself from a year ago. Keep the documentation with the data!
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Create the data you want to see in the word - Imagine someone was about to give you a dataset that you needed to analyse well in order to get that job you’ve been dreaming about. What would you want it to look like? That’s how yours should look.
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Try not to re-invent the wheel. Before you start creating some crazy new schema, storage format or naming protocol - have a quick google, ask your colleagues. Something that’s already being used is likely going to be better in the long run even if you think there’s a better solution.