Book review: Managing Your Research Data and Documentation

Berenson, K.R. 2018. Managing Your Research Data and Documentation. American Psychological Association. [ISBN 978- 1-4338-2709-9. 108 pages, including index. US$29.95 (softcover).]

Modern research is increasingly complex, and generates copious, complex research data and associated support materials, such as database search results and the paperwork required to obtain institutional review board (IRB) approval. Organizing this data represents a formidable challenge, particularly for new researchers or research groups. In addition, it’s increasingly necessary to archive data in ways that let future researchers replicate or validate a study. Finally, errors must be eliminated during data collection and management because they have significant consequences for both human lives and future research. Kathy Berenson’s Managing Your Research Data and Documentation provides concise, logically structured, and invaluable advice on how to accomplish these goals.

Berenson summarizes her goals as teaching you how to manage project files, manage your data (safeguarding original data, detecting and correcting data-entry errors), document your research and analysis methods (including your data-processing algorithms), and prepare replication instructions to guide future researchers (data descriptions, such as metadata; instructions for how to handle missing data). She devotes a chapter to explaining the key aspects of each subject with appendices that provide additional details. Though most examples focus on the widely used SPSS software, they should be easy to translate into other software.

The writing is clear, concise, and practical. It includes essential advice such as how to develop a hierarchical structure for storing and managing all of a project’s information, protecting original data against inadvertent modification, standardizing variable names and analytical methods, clearly documenting everything you do (especially protocols for compiling and processing data), and dealing with the inevitable problems that arise as you process a collection of data. Berenson repeatedly emphasizes the importance of protecting the privacy of study participants, copyright considerations, and (implicitly) protecting proprietary information.

One thing that would benefit from more detail is how to characterize a study population sufficiently well

that future researchers who try to repeat your study can choose a comparable population. Differences between populations are a major source of the replicability crisis that affects most research, but particularly in the social sciences. Although this is, in fairness, better suited to a research design book, it’s sufficiently important for replication that it should have been handled explicitly, with examples of how researchers inadvertently fail to control their selection of research participants. A more serious omission is detailed instructions on how to back up one’s data; relying solely on an employer’s overworked computer staff is unwise. A good backup strategy should include near-line (on a flash drive), offline (on DVD), and cloud-based backups. I would also have liked to see a section on documenting “lessons learned”, so future researchers can avoid repeating your mistakes. As in previous books I’ve reviewed in this series, the index is primitive.

Whether you’re just getting started in research or are finding that you need help managing your research, Managing Your Research Data and Documentation is well worth your time.