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Research data management: a practical guide

Organising your data

A practical guide to help you manage your research data well, covering best practice for the successful organisation, storage, documentation, archiving and sharing of research data.

organising

A well organised folder structure and meaningful folder and file names will help you to find, retrieve and reuse your research data quickly and accurately.

File organisation

As you begin to create, gather and manipulate more and more files they can soon become disorganised. It's good practice to established a file organisation scheme at the start of your project, before the number of files proliferates and you loose track of file names or file location.

file organisationYou should make use of folders to help organise your data files into meaningful and useful groups. As data files can be organised in many different ways your aim is to develop an organisation scheme that works for your research. Thinking about how you want to browse your files may help you to devise a scheme.

  • Folder names should be meaningful and convey concisely the content of the files inside.

  • Structure folders hierarchically with a limited number of high-level folders for broad topics, and more specific folders within these.

  • Avoid too many layers in your hierarchy, up to three or four is manageable, any more and you may find it difficult to navigate.

  • Sensitive data (e.g. participant records) should be stored in separate folders with appropriate access controls.

  • Agree a file organisation scheme that everyone will follow when working with other researchers. If you are new to a research group, check if there's a scheme to follow.

It's a good idea to document your file organisation scheme: recording the naming convention and any abbreviations/codes you will use, and what should go into each folder. If you save this as a 'readme' .txt file and store it in your project's top level folder, you (and others) will be able to access it easily.

University of Gent: Keeping research data organized

This video looks at the different aspects of file organisation, including tips and best practices.

Version control

It's important to be able to distinguish between different versions or drafts of your files to avoid working on older or outdated copies, or worse overwriting important data.

Version control or versioning is a system to record changes to a file over time. If you are working with others it is useful to link versions with the time and the author of the change.

There are some simple things you can do to manage different versions of your data:

  • File naming: include clear version information in a file name e.g. v1, v2; v1-0 , v1-1 using the first number for major changes and the second for minor changes; v1_LP if you are working in a group and need to keep track of who made the changes.

  • Version control tables: document changes in a version control table within the document recording the version number, date of the change, name of the person making the change, and the purpose/nature of the change.

  • Version control systems: automated systems that keep track of the changes made to a file or files over time, with a history of all changes it's possible to see each change and to revert back to a previous version. These systems are particularly useful for the collaborative development of code or software e.g. GitHub.

Research Coding Club has an introduction to version control: a crash course in git basics and version control with Git and GitHub. Guidance on versioning is also available from the UK Data Service.

File naming

Good file and folder naming improves searching, helps you and others distinguish documents from one another, allows documents to be sorted into a logical order, and makes it easier to interpret documents and information from their file name.

You should think about developing a naming convention, rules for naming files (and folders) in a consistent and logical way, at the start of your project and documenting it.

The following suggestions may help you to develop a naming convention for your files (and folders):

  • Files should be named consistently

  • File names should be short but descriptive

  • Think about ordering the elements within a file name logically and to enable sorting

  • Avoid spaces in file names, use capitals and underscores instead e.g. FileName.xxx or file_name.xxx

  • Avoid special characters (~ ! @ # $ &), periods or slashes in file names.

  • YYYYMMDD is a good format for dates, and to sort files chronologically.

  • If you use sequential numbering, add leading zeros (e.g. 001, 002, ...010, 011 ...100, 101, etc.) for clarity, and to sort numerically.

  • Embed version control in file names - date and time or version numbers -to enable accurate identification of current and previous versions of files.

Non-digital data

Although this guidance concentrates on digital data, you should remember to extend the same care and attention to data held in physical form.

Physical files, folders and materials also need to be organised in a meaningful and consistent way, and the organisation system devised should be well documented.