UHD / Office of the Provost / Office of Research and Sponsored Programs / Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects / Best Practices for Data Management
Best Practices for Data Management
- Use descriptive and informative file names.
- Choose file formats that ensure long term access.
- Track different versions of your documents.
- Create metadata for every experiment or analysis you run.
- Create a plan for how to transfer knowledge and data for a project for when it changes hands or someone leaves a team to prevent valuable data from being lost.
- Back-up your data in at least two, secure locations to avoid unintentional data loss and to protect your intellectual property.
- File or hard-drive corruption, and other unforeseen events can strike without warning. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Manuscripts, spreadsheets, and other files on your UHD office computers
- Qualtrics survey data (please download all data from the Qualtrics server)
- Data stored in cloud servers
- Data associated with laboratory instrumentation
- Scan data that currently exists in hardcopy-only formats and keep electronic copies
- When working on manuscripts, please save multiple, iterative drafts of your work and use Track changes to record contributions from collaborators on drafts.