Collecting and Protecting Your Data

Vicky Steeves & Nicholas Wolf | April 8, 2017

Human Error

Jason Karaian, Years of Genomics Research is Riddled with Errors Thanks to a Bunch of Botched Excel Spreadsheets" Quartz (28 Aug. 2016).

This is another example: a more recent case where a very famous economics paper was making wrong conclusions. The paper shows that countries with debt over 90% of their gross domestic product (GDP) have a negative growth rate; this paper was published at the same time that Greece was having an economic crisis. But no one could actually reproduce the conclusions that the authors had – researchers could not replicate the results of the paper. Eventually, researchers from UMass asked the authors for their data spreadsheet, and it turned out that there was a mistake in one of their Excel formulas, where they erroneously excluded 5 countries from their study. If results were made reproducible since the beginning, this mistake would have been discovered way earlier – maybe in time for publication, by reviewers – and which would avoid the bad publicity.

Disappearing Data

Research Data Management

Managing the way data is collected, processed, analyzed, preserved, and published for greater reuse by the community and the original researcher.

What is Data?

"the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings." -Federal Office of Management & Budget Circular A-110

Federal Regulations

Documenting Local Files

Basic Management Principles

Use a file management system to annotate and locate files; use a systematic file naming system.
Use "readme" files to annotate and explain file content.
Use open file formats that are software agnostic.

Long Term Storage

Choose what you want to preserve/get to in the long term, but No matter WHAT, make sure you keep:

documentation (lab/field notebooks, etc.)
tools & analysis

Put your data into an archival format!

this should be open + accessible
Software agnostic

Create a Researcher Identity

Open Researcher & Contributor ID

free! persistent identifier for researchers (think DOI)
link all your publications to you rather than someone with your same name!
many journals are asking for an ORCID upon submission of materials

Do you have one? No? Let’s get you an ORCID.org!

Documentation with the Open Science Framework

Wiki: document your lab procedures, standards, etc.
Collaborators: add collaborators of all levels, on different parts of your project
Components: sub-projects to organize your research
Version Control: upload files of the same name & OSF will track your versions!
Add-Ons: use OSF to bring together tools you use | GitHub
Registrations: when you have an unchanging version of your project, register it & get a DOI!

Questions?

Email us: vicky.steeves@nyu.edu & nicholas.wolf@nyu.edu

Learn more about RDM: guides.nyu.edu/data_management

Get this presentation: guides.nyu.edu/data_management/resources

Make an appointment: guides.nyu.edu/appointment