Describe and document your research data at the onset of your project and throughout, to ensure that the data can be accessed, understood, used, shared and re-used by a range of researchers, for a variety of purposes.

The ACU Research Data Management Policy requires that research data must be documented and/or described by adequate descriptive and technical metadata.

• Document your data at a project level and data-level, using standard terminology appropriate for your discipline.
• Provide a detailed description of the data’s attributes and the context around data collection, transformation and analysis. Describe what you did and why you made the choices you made.
• Store the documentation alongside your research data. Your data and documentation should be in secure and backed up storage recommended by ACU eResearch or compliant with the Australian Code for Responsible Conduct of Research. Download the section titled Management of Data and Information in Research (PDF, 281KB).

Answer these questions when documenting and describing your data

• What was/is the context of data collection (empirical, theoretical, and/or normative)?
• How did you generate/collect the data?
• In what form are the data (e.g., interview transcript)?
• What are the data about (i.e., what is your research about)?
• How are the data formatted, structured, and organized?
• How did you transform or manipulate the data (e.g. modify format)?
• How did you validate/assure the quality of the data?
• What ethical or legal limits (e.g. confidentiality, copyright) are there on access to/use/re-use of the data?
• How did you analyse the data?

Document and describe your data throughout the duration of your project

• At the beginning of your project, when preparing and updating your data management plan
• During the project in order to stay organized
• On project completion for your own recollection and re-use, and for sharing informally with colleagues
• When preparing reports to funders, technical reports, working papers or publications
• Before archiving data to ensure it is preserved correctly
• In preparation for data sharing or publication

Read the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Guide to Metadata for an overview of data description and collection for research data.