To promote the reusability of your research data, but also to make your work easier for yourself and your colleagues, you need to develop rules for organising your research data. Establishing a logical and consistent system for organizing your datasets will enable you and others to find and use them efficiently, help maintain data integrity, or enhance the reputation of your scientific work.

When considering how to organise your data, keep the following principles in mind:

The file naming system makes it easier to find your data and navigate through them during and after research. A well-configured file naming system should ensure:

There is no one right or universal way to set up a folder naming system, however, the important thing is that the structure you decide to use is logical, readable, and makes sense for the purpose. For example, you can organize your folders:

• by task (e.g. work package, experiment, documentation) li>
• by a significant defining characteristic (e.g. location, sample number, company name, experiment type)
• data type (e.g. raw, processed, final)
• by measurement method (e.g. for larger projects, with multiple activities and using multiple measurement methods or sample conditioning techniques)

File versioning is a system for recording changes to a file or set of files over time. Versioning plays a big role whenever you work in a research group where you all share and edit files. Uncontrolled versions of files edited by different people can easily spread, which can cause chaos in the research data and the transformations the data has gone through. In the worst-case scenario, this can compromise the integrity of the data- for example, if the raw data file is overwritten.

There are a few simple things you can do to implement effective version control. It is not necessary to always use all of the following tips, it will highly depend on the nature of your research and the processes that the data undergoes.

Version control can be provided by adding a number to the end of the file name. Each document is then numbered sequentially from v0.1, v0.2, v0.3... until a new, final version of the document is created. Then eventually the file should be named v1.0. If the v1.0 version is to be revised, drafts would be again numbered as v1.1, v1.2, etc. until the v2.0 version is completed.

All versioning rules need to be set at the beginning of the research or project so that everyone involved knows how to handle the versions and how to write down any changes.