Documentation
Overview
Teaching: 0 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
What is documentation?
Objectives
Describe what needs to be documented.
Documentation
Documentation is the idea of documenting your procedures for your experiment so that an outsider could understand the workings of your lab. This can include where your results and working data are saved.
- Copy your lab notebook if you have one onto a digital format and save it to a safe place (such as research storage).
- Make sure these are saved somewhere that’s accessible to your supervisor/team.
Bus Factor
Have you got a new staff member coming onboard to your team? They are a prime candidate to collate information and document as it will help them become familiar to the team and learn how the lab/team works.
Note: Ideally you want to document anything that a lab member coming on board would need to know. Documentation is all about changing your Bus Factor - how many people on a project would need to be hit by a bus to make a project fail. Many times, projects can have a bus factor of one. Adding documentation means when someone goes on leave, needs to take leave suddenly or finishes their study, their work is preserved for your lab.
Documentation helps with reproducible science
Documentation will also be important for any audits in your lab or if someone would like to reproduce your research.
Documentation is a love letter to your future self -by Damian Conway
How do we start? - Beginners
Read this first: How to start Documenting and more by CESSDA ERIC. Start with documenting in a text file or document - any start is a good start. Have this document automatically synced to the cloud with your data or keep this in a shared place that your organisation supports and recommends.
How do we start? - Intermediate
Once you have the basics in place, go into detail on how your workflow goes from your raw data to the finished results. This can be anything from a downloaded function list from SPSS/Virtual Lab to the code used to create it.
How do we start? - Advanced
Now that you’ve got a good head start, time to learn about Git Repositories and wikis.
External Resources
- British Ecology Reproducibility Book
- How to start Documenting and more by CESSDA ERIC
- Software Carpentry Git Workshop
Key Points
Documentation is the idea of documenting your procedures for your experiment so that an outsider could understand how to reproduce it. This can include where your results and working data are saved.