Data standards for sharing research data
Data standards aim to promote interoperability and good data management.
Requirements
R1. Studies take an active and collaborative approach to ensuring timely development and adoption of appropriate data standards to support high quality research and data-sharing.
Expectations
1. Studies adopt and proactively champion a standards-based approach to managing and sharing research data.
2. Studies prioritise the compilation of well-structured variable and metadata catalogues (a) as part of good research and data management and (b) to enable data-sharing and linkage.
3. The study description and variable metadata catalogues are published to the wider research community, including where possible through the MRC Research Data Gateway to maximise the visibility to the wider research community for bona-fide research.
4. For significant datasets of data collected in the past “legacy data sets” that have not been fully documented, Directors/PIs plan their data management to maximise value from the data over a reasonable time period. This may involve selective documentation of variables of likely interest rather than global documentation of all variables.
Resources
The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international metadata standard to describe data from the social and behavioral sciences across the life cycle. Expressed in XML, the DDI metadata specification supports the research data life cycle from data conceptualization, collection, processing, distribution, discovery, analysis, repurposing to archiving. The DDI community also provides open source tools.
The DDI metadata standard has been used for the following population health studies:
- Secure Epidemiology Research Platform (SERPent), MRC Centre of Epidemiology for Child Health
- Norwegian Tromsø study
The Microdata Management Toolkit developed by the World Bank Data Group for the International Household Survey Network aims to promote the adoption of international standards and best practices for microdata documentation, dissemination and preservation. It includes a DDI/Dublin Core compliant Metadata Editor and Nesstar Explorer to read metadata files.
Nesstar Publisher provides data and metadata conversion and editing tools to edit and create DDI documented datasets and to prepare metadata and data for publication to a Nesstar Server.
The UK Data Archive provides researchers with guidance on managing and sharing data, including guidance to documenting data and metadata. A helpful guide is their Managing and Sharing Data: Best Practice for Researchers.
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides guidance on data preparation, access, curation and archiving; e.g. through their Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving.
The Australian National Data Service provides a valuable guide to data management for researchers, including an introduction to metadata (data about data).
The National Statistics Code of Practice - Protocol on Data Management, Documentation and Preservation sets out how producers of National Statistics will carry out their responsibilities for managing, documenting, retaining and preserving the statistical resources they control.