Library Subject Guides
This is a practical guide to help you manage your research data well, covering best practice for the successful storage, organisation, documentation, archiving and sharing of research data.
This guidance is intended for researchers of all levels, and across all academic disciplines.
The UK Data Services' research data lifecycle illustrates the stages of data management, from the start to the finish of a research project.
Planning for the management of research data, addressing any ethical and legal issues and gathering together research data management costs.
Successfully managing and handling research data while you are working with it, how research data is stored, secured, organised, formatted and documented; complying with funder, University, other relevant regulations and legal requirements.
Selecting research data for archiving and sharing, uploading selected research data to an appropriate data repository, deciding whether and on what terms the data will be made available, and selecting an appropriate licence.
Linking shared research data to associated published outputs, writing a data access statement to include in published outputs and recording shared datasets in PURE / WREO.
The University of York recognises the importance of research data management and has a Research Data Management Policy.
The Policy requires that you to manage and handle your research data well, and for staff and postgraduate researchers (doctoral level), to consider archiving and sharing (where possible) research data at the end of your project. You should read it.
Good research data management enables the University and its researchers to meet the standards and responsibilities set out in the University's Code of practice on research integrity and:
meet funder, ethical, legal and other responsibilities
maintain an accurate, complete, reliable and coherent representation of the materials used/collected
store research data securely and safely
preserve data which is identifiable, retrievable, and available when needed (and as appropriate)
to be able to make research data available to others in line with appropriate ethical, data sharing, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and open access principles.
A number of services are offered to help you navigate the practicalities of managing and sharing your research data. This includes a data management plan review service, creating PURE dataset records for datasets archived and shared in external data repositories and Research Data York, a data repository for research undertaken at the University.
Read more about the services provided on the Managing and sharing your research data web page.
In addition to this guide we provide RDM 101, an online tutorial designed to provide you with an introduction to research data management.
It's available to staff and postgraduate researchers (doctoral level). Complete it in the VLE
The Open Research team offer regular sessions for postgraduate researchers and staff through the training programme coordinated by the BRIC Team.
To book a session go to: SkillsForge - Postgraduate Researchers or LMS - Staff (login required).
Next sessions:
Postgraduate researchers may ask you for advice about data management and writing their data management plan. The Open Research team is here to help you support your PGRs.
Watch a video recording on RDM for supervisors of postgraduate researchers
Open in Google Slides to follow the links to more detailed guidance
Data: a practical guide pulls together a range of data resources.
It includes guidance on:
cleaning data, linking out to tools such as OpenRefine and a practical guide to spreadsheets
data analysis for both quantitative and qualitative data
data visualisation and ways to better communicate your data with others.
The guide is provided by the digital skills team who are also responsible for user education in the application of digital technologies. Training is listed on the training page of the Skills Guide.
MANTRA provides data handling tutorials
Mantra is a free online RDM course created by the University of Edinburgh.
You can use the open datasets with the exercises provided to practice manipulating data in the software analysis packages: SPSS, R, ArcGIS, NVivo.
RDMbites: Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Justice in RDM is a collection of four short videos.
The collection includes videos on:
EDIJ and decolonisation in data management
EDIJ and decolonisation in data management: why should I care?
Data management and disabilities
Decolonising data management in the biosciences
Although aimed at researchers working in the life sciences, the principles discussed in the videos will be of interest to those working in other research fields.
This collection is part of a broader set of resources provided by ELIXIR, Europe's distributed infrastructure for life science information.
University guidance: The research integrity and ethics web pages and the codes of practice set out the University’s framework for high quality and robust practice across the full research process.
If you have any questions, want to know more, or if you want us to talk about specific aspects of RDM with groups of staff/postgraduate researchers in your department, email us: lib-open-research@york.ac.uk
If your question is more complex, you can book an appointment to get personalised guidance on RDM
