1 Introduction
This guidebook assists Portland State faculty and students with the proper care and management of their research data by gathering together the University’s infrastructure, training, and recommended best practices.
The guidebook is loosely organized by the data lifecycle.
Image from: https://guides.lib.virginia.edu/researchmgmt
The term “data management” will be used frequently in the guidebook. Data management is
the process by which researchers plan to collect, store, archive, and ultimately share their research data. Many questions related to Data Management have long been issues researchers are trained to address through the course of their work:
- What data are collected and created?
- How are the data created or collected?
- What supplemental documentation is needed to understand the data?
- Are there privacy issues associated with your data collection?
- Are there legal issues associated with your data?
- How will your data be stored and backed-up during the project?
- How will you ensure data security?
- How much of the collected data will be retained and shared when the project is concluded?
- What is the long-term preservation plan?
- How will the final data be shared?
More about data management can be found on the University Library’s Manage Your Research Data guide.
This figure illustrates the importance of data management in the fight against “information entropy.” After the time of publication, the usefulness of research data steadily becomes more vulnerable to human memory lapses, storage failures, career changes, and eventual death of the investigator.
Michener, W. K., Brunt, J. W., Helly, J. J., Kirchner, T. B., & Stafford, S. G. (1997). Nongeospatial metadata for the ecological sciences. Ecological Applications, 7 (1), 330-342.
Research reproducibility is also a significant motivating factor for good data management. Many funding agencies and journals are requiring the publication of research data in order to facilitate reproducibility. To learn more about reproducibility and replicability in science, read National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Reproducibility and Replicability in Science.
