Research Data Management

Once we know what we want to ask, we need to consider how we're going to organize our project and it's data. How we do this - Research Data Management or RDM for short - is a critical component of reproducibility and transparency in the sciences.

In BIOL116, you were introduced to best practices in file naming. You may wish to review that content. In this lab, you'll be looking at best practices in directory structure management; that is, how we organize our individual files.

Just like with file naming conventions, it is extremely important that our files are organized in a way that logically reflects the structure of our project and can be easily navigated with computational tools, allowing for, at a minimum, computational reproducibility. There is also an increased need to provide documentation that describes the chosen structure; in fact, the more complex a project becomes, the more this documentation is important.

So, please review the content on directory structure management in the BIOL Procedures and Guidelines.