Data Management

The Dataverse Network offers you a framework for Data Management. A number of funding agencies (e.g., NSF and NIH) currently require researchers to provide a data management plan when they submit a grant proposal. More and more journals ask authors to make the data associated with the publication accessible. Making data accessible through a personal web site is vulnerable and it's likely not to follow archival good practices. How do you provide a solution that gives researchers a place to deposit their data and give them credit and ownership, and at the same time satisfies the requirements set by funding agencies and journals accessible in perpetuity?

Dataverse gives you a solution:

Researchers and research groups can create a dataverse, upload their data, manage updates and relase new versions, grant access to others, and brand their dataverse as their web site (see Dataverse as a service).

Publishers and journals can either provide a dataverse for their authors, or install a Dataverse Network for all their publications data (see Dataverse Network as a software package for this option).

Institutions and organizations can choose to install a Dataverse Network and provide a repository for their researchers and data owners to deposit their data.

Best Practices

Libraries and Archives rely heavily on the Internet and Web for knowledge discovery. They do this by offering access to digitized resources, and this new environment calls for new methods of describing and organizing those resources. Libraries also realize the advantages of standardizing practices among data networks. High level of cataloging compatibility leads to searches that are more successful when document surrogates are consistent with others in the same system. We strive to follow the same cataloging practices as other participating libraries so that optimum compatibility of records can be obtained. This being said, we suggest the following as Best Practice Guidelines for using the Dataverse Network.

  1. Citation Information includes a set of information that includes the study title, the author, the producer, the production date, the distributor and the distributor's contact information, and the date of deposit. If the study is based on an "original" publication and the data can be replicated, the original publication is referenced in the "original publication" field, and a link to the original course is also included. It isimportant to complete the fields included above, to ensure data users reference your study correctly in publications.

  2. Abstract and Scope is a physical description of the study and should include the following information: The purpose of this study, subject (# and population characteristics), general statement on data collection, variables assessed, available data, questions and scales

  3. Topic Classification indicates the broad susbstantive topic(s) that the data cover. Most American libraries use either the Library of Congress (LCC) or the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). 
  4. Remaining categories in the Abstract and Scope section of the cataloging page may be completed as necessary
  5. Terms of Use contains the general IQSS Dataverse Terms of Use, and allows dataverse owners to add additional terms of use as they see fit. A good example of additional Terms of Use if found in the Murray Research Archive (link to www.murray.harvard.edu) dataverse, under TERMS OF USE  found in the "Cataloging Information" tab. See the Terms of Use information tab on the right-hand side of this page for more information on the purpose of this function.