Document your data at the very beginning of your research project!
Careful documentation on the collecting or creating and processing of data is important to the quality of the data. The documentation is crucial to the long-term storage of your data. Good documentation - good metadata - is necessary for other researchers to find, understand, use and properly cite your data.
Following are some general guidelines for aspects of your project and data that you should document, regardless of your discipline. At minimum, store this documentation in a readme.txt file or the equivalent, together with the data.
You should plan, how to give names to your files in the beginning of the project. The plan has to exact enough and cover all the needs during the whole project. The goals for planning are
Good instructions for naming:
Quality control of data is an integral part of all research and takes place at various stages, during data collection, data entry or digitisation, and data checking. It is vital to assign clear roles and responsibilities and to develop suitable procedures before data gathering starts. During data collection researchers must ensure that the data recorded reflect the actual facts, responses, observations and events. The quality of data collection methods used strongly influences data quality, and documenting in detail how data are collected provides evidence of such quality.
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