Five easy resolutions for better data management: 

1. Plan ahead to create high-quality, shareable research data

A data management plan will help you organise, document and enhance the use of your research data. It will enable you to consistently implement good practices, assign roles and responsibilities to the relevant parties in the research and help identify whether further training might be needed. You can find our advice on data management planning here. 

2. Make data clear to understand and easy to use

To ensure that research data can be used, shared and reused by a wide range of researchers you should make sure that your data are accessible, understandable and usable. This requires clear data descriptions, annotation, contextual information and documentation that explains how data were created, what data mean, what their content and structure are and any manipulations that have taken place. Explore the best practice for documenting your data here.

3. Create well-organised and sustainable data

Think about how best to structure data files, making them easier to locate and organise. If you're working in collaboration with others there is an even greater need for orderly structure to your data. You can find examples of good practice for structuring and naming files here. 

4. Backup your data so it is recoverable

Don't lose your data! Ensuring that your data are safe is crucial to any research project. A good storage and backup strategy will help prevent potential data loss and enable you to recover your data if something goes wrong. 

5. Ensure sensitive data are safely stored and encrypted

If you're working with sensitive data you need to be particularly careful to store data safely and encrypt information so that only authorised parties can view it. Some types of encryption provide greater protection than others; the type and level of encryption used should correspond to the sensitivity of the data being protected. You can find advice on using encryption here.

Would you like to know more? Get in touch or sign up for our webinar on data management basics on 9 February. Our introductory webinar provides an overview of how to manage, document, store and safeguard research data and how to plan and implement good data management in research projects, with a view to optimising data sharing.

The UK Data Service wishes you a successful 2017!