Knowing how to manage, share, and protect your research data is crucial to your academic and professional success.

Follow us during Love Your Data Week, Feb. 8-12. We will guide you through five activities to help get your data organized, secure, and ready for write-up, sharing and reuse.

GOOD PRACTICE
Have a plan for organizing your data. This usually includes a folder structure and file naming scheme (plan). Easier said than done, but check out the tips below!

Source: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1323

Things to Avoid:

Source: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1531

Google “bad file names” and browse through the images for entertainment

TODAY’S ACTIVITY

If you don’t already have a folder structure and/or file naming scheme, come up with one and share it. Some good practices are described below.

Discuss as a team to decide on a scheme that works for the whole group

For example, a sequence of 1-10 should be numbered 01-10; a sequence of 1-100 should be numbered 001-010-100.

Some people like to use a dash ( – ) to separate words

Others like to separate words by capitalizing the first letter of each (e.g., DST_FileNamingScheme_20151216)

Put dates at the beginning or the end of your files, not in the middle

OK: DST_FileNamingScheme_20151216

OK: 20151216_DST_FileNamingScheme

AVOID: DST_20151216_FileNamingScheme

Learn more at: http://loveyourdata.wordpress.com