Data collection

“ The larger scientific community also benefits: sharing data encourages multiple perspectives, helps to identify errors, discourages fraud, is useful for training new researchers, and increases efficient use of funding and patient population resources by avoiding duplicate data collection.
Making research data publicly available also has challenges and costs. Some costs are borne by society: For example, data archives must be created and maintained. Many costs, however, are borne by the data-collecting investigators: Data must be documented, formatted, and uploaded. ”

“ Asking questions at the design stage can save headaches at the analysis stage: careful data collection can greatly simplify analysis and make it more rigorous. Or, as Sir Ronald Fisher put it: “To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. ”

“ The more the data created by your colleagues is accessible as an organized collection of some sort, the better your community's research capacity. The more data get shared, used, and cited, the more they improve. Besides personal involvement and encouragement, the best way to reward data sharing is by attribution: always cite the sources of data that you use. Follow good scientific practice and give credit to those whose data you use, following their preferred reference format and according to current best practices. ”

“ Such plans typically cover all or portions of the data life cycle—from data discovery, collection, and organization (e.g., spreadsheets, databases) , through quality assurance/quality control, documentation (e.g., data types, laboratory methods) and use of the data, to data preservation and sharing with others (e.g., data policies and dissemination approaches) . Fig 1 illustrates the relationship between hypothetical research and data life cycles and highlights the links to the rules presented in this paper. The DMP undergoes peer review and is used in part to evaluate a project’s merit. ”

“ In order to build up a central collection of statistical information for general use, it is agreed that data supplied to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization for incorporation in its basic statistical series or special reports should, so far as practicable, be made available to the United Nations. ”

“ In short, the more extended collection of economic data is now rendered possible by the better methods employed in census and statistical bureaus, and the resort to the work of verification of economic principles by the examination of these data is the one thing only which can redeem political economy from the baseless and common charge of being a set of impractical formulæ. ”

“ Peer review of the potential data paper manuscript is expected to evaluate completeness and quality of the metadata. This may include the validity of methods used and standards conformance during the collection, management and curation of data. To meet the reviewers' expectations for accuracy and usefulness, the metadata needs to be as complete and descriptive as possible. ”

“ Note that many research sponsors define data broadly to include physical collections, software and code, and curriculum materials.# Sources. Data may come from direct human observation, laboratory and field instruments, experiments, simulations, and compilations of data from other studies. Reviewers and sponsors may be particularly interested in understanding if data are proprietary, are being compiled from other studies, pertain to human subjects, or are otherwise subject to restrictions in their use or redistribution.# Volume. ”

“ Data papers should describe in detail how the data was acquired, with which goals and constraints, an assessment of their quality, how they have and how they can or should be reused, how to get access, give feedback and credit. Datasets are technical and critical building blocks of science and should be recognized as such by high impact and heavy citation, ensuring that creators of data are appropriately acknowledged for their work. ”

“ Rule 1. Love Your Data, and Help Others Love It, Too Data management is a repeat-play game. If you take care to make your data easily available to others, others are more likely to do the same—eventually. ”

“ Experienced reviewers will be on the lookout for unfunded components, but they will also recognize that greater or lesser investments in data management depend upon the nature of the research and the types of data. ”

“ Introduction Data is the central currency of science, but the nature of scientific data has changed dramatically with the rapid pace of technology. This change has led to the development of a wide variety of data formats, dataset sizes, data complexity, data use cases, and data sharing practices. ”

“ Importantly, almost all of these mechanisms are aligned with more efficient and effective scientific progress: increased data use, facilitated credibility determination, earlier access, improved discoverability, and a focus on best work through data availability are good for both investigators and the science community as a whole. ”

“ Statistics on family in the USA and the world are a matter of public record. The processing and interpretation of data, even in the age of electronic processing, takes time once data has been collected. ”

“ The attribution system used for scholarly articles, accomplished via citations, often breaks in the case of data and software. When other authors reuse or cite your data or code, you may get an acknowledgment or an incoming link. If you and your colleagues have gone to the trouble to write a “data paper,” whose main purpose is to describe your data and/or code, you may also get a citation [8] . But, “data paper” writing is not always desirable, or relevant. So, how do you go about getting the full credit you deserve for your data and code? ”

“ While we encourage the field to make use of opportunities for data publishing, we realize that standards for metadata, provenance, and other descriptors are critical. INCF’s Task Force on Data Sharing looks forward to working with the community to converge on such standards. ”

“ Perfect documentation of provenance is rarely, if ever, attained in scientific work today. The higher the quality of provenance information, the higher the chance of enabling data reuse. In general, data reuse is most possible when: 1) data; 2) metadata (information describing the data) ; and 3) information about the process of generating those data, such as code, are all provided. ”

“ Generally, making data available to the greatest extent and with the fewest possible restrictions at the time of publication or project completion is encouraged. The more proactive approaches described above are greatly preferred over mailing or emailing data and will likely save significant time and money in the long run, as the data curation and sharing will be supported by the appropriate journals and repositories or archives. ”

“ Passive approaches include posting data on a project or personal website or mailing or emailing data upon request, although the latter can be problematic when dealing with large data and bandwidth constraints. More active, robust, and preferred approaches include: (1) publishing the data in an open repository or archive (see Rule 6) ; (2) submitting the data (or subsets thereof) as appendices or supplements to journal articles, such as is commonly done with the PLOS family of journals; and (3) publishing the data, metadata, and relevant code as a “data paper” [5] . ”

“ Building upon this work, we suggest several possible sources for an “Open Data citation benefit”:
Data Reuse. Papers with available datasets can be used in ways that papers without data cannot, and may receive additional citations as a result. Credibility Signalling. The credibility of research findings may be higher for research papers with available data. Such papers may be preferentially chosen as background citations or the foundation of additional research. Increased Visibility. ”

“ The best-laid preservation plans and data sharing policies do not necessarily mean that a project’s data will see the light of day. Reviewers and research sponsors will be reassured that this will not be the case if you have spelled out how and when the data products will be disseminated to others, especially people outside your research group. There are passive and active ways to disseminate data. ”

“ In fact, printed reports of such government work as that of agricultural experiment stations, divisions of the department of agriculture, various testing laboratories, the geological survey, the departments of commerce and labor, or the interstate commerce commission, and reports of corresponding work carried on by various cities and states, furnish quantities of valuable data that need only to be presented in popular form to be of general interest. ”

“ Research papers and data products are key outcomes of the science enterprise. Governmental, nongovernmental, and private foundation sponsors of research are increasingly recognizing the value of research data. As a result, most funders now require that sufficiently detailed data management plans be submitted as part of a research proposal. A data management plan (DMP) is a document that describes how you will treat your data during a project and what happens with the data after the project ends. ”

“ Our understanding of research practice suffers because access to tools and data is so difficult.
Patterns of data reuse To better understand patterns of data reuse, a larger sample of reuse instances was needed than could easily be assembled through manual classification of citation context. To that end, we used a complementary source of information about reuse of the same datasets: direct mention of GEO or ArrayExpress accession numbers within the body of a full-text research article. ”

“ Educational journals, forestry publications, mining statistics, geological surveys, court decisions, all furnish valuable data. The only requirement in obtaining information is personal observation and investigation. ”

“ Data maintenance procedures.—Heads of agencies that have databases or data systems linked to the entry and exit data system shall establish rules, guidelines, policies, and operating and auditing procedures for collecting, removing, and updating data maintained in, and adding information to, such databases or data systems that ensure the accuracy and integrity of the data and for limiting access to the information in the databases or data systems to authorized personnel. ”

“ Here are some ways in which dBASE II might organize your records if you’re an executive like Bowie:
1. The CREATE command lets you begin a file.
2. A file in a data base is the electronic version of a file drawer or cabinet. It’s just the space on the disks holding records—say, the house-budget summaries for your homes.
3. A field is a category of fact like the amount of money spent on each air-conditioning system for each house.
4. Structure is simply the way a record is set up. ”

“ Here, we perform a large multivariate analysis of the citation differential for studies in which gene expression microarray data either was or was not made available in a public repository.
Estimating the citation differential is not enough: crafting good data archiving policy requires an understanding of its origins. How quickly do data reuse citations accrue? Do the additional citations arise due to data reuse – as we might expect – or simply from increased exposure or trust in the original study? How often do data reuse studies attribute data from more than one source? ”

“ Hence the great value of having two independent sets of data compiled for different purposes by men living at the antipodes, New England and New South Wales. The discrepancy in the two sets of data is an advantage because the one supplements the other, and because where the original sources of information are so diverse, the harmonious result derived from averages is highly remarkable. ”

“ Machine-readable data files were useful to a growing number of disciplines. RLIN contained records describing a number of such files, from the full-text French literary works in the ARTFL Database to the statistical data collected by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan;
(2) A catalog of archives and special collections. The archival and manuscript collections of research libraries, museums, state archives, and historical societies contained essential primary resources, but information about their contents was often elusive. ”

“ If the full set of reports is not wanted, by all means the Abstract should be secured, as it contains the summaries. The series of Bulletins issued by the permanent bureau contains the recent statistics, estimates, and are the source for much of the data found in the annual newspaper almanacs. These publications are supplied free of charge to libraries upon application to the Director of the Census or to members of Congress. The Department of Commerce and Labor has issued a List of Publications ... ”

“ At the very least, loving your own available data will serve you: you'll be able to find and reuse your own data if you treat them well. Second, enable and encourage others to cherish, document, and publish their data. If you are a research scientist, chances are that not only are you an author, but also a reviewer for a specialized journal or conference venue. As a reviewer, request that the authors of papers you review provide documentation and access to their data according to the rules set out in the remainder of this article. ”

“ Databases with a good user experience make it easy to navigate and find data even by non-experts. Database navigation is facilitated by a graphical user interface that organizes, presents, and visualizes these data in a human accessible manner. ”

“ That system of accounts which groups only one kind of data under each particular account title is better than a system which mixes its records by grouping dissimilar data under a single head. Yet, caution is always to be exercised against too great detail and an unnecessary multiplication of accounts. Oftentimes essential facts and forces of business activity are lost sight of in a maze of detail. ”