Introducing research data - fourth edition

Research Data Introduction material, used with students in the University of Southampton with contributions from Archaeology, Chemistry, Medicine and Engineering. Every discipline, from the arts and humanities to physics, is increasingly using data to drive forward its goals. Medicine might use it for recording the statistics of a particular drugs trial; physicists have complex experiments---such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN---producing massive quantities of data on an hourly basis; and archaeologists meticulously preserve digital records of excavation sites and artefacts. This guide first introduces the forms data can take by showing five ways of looking at data, then presents some case studies of data usage in several disciplines in an attempt to illustrate the types of data you might encounter in your research and give you some tips or tricks that will help you in your own discipline. The final part of the guide gives some general advice on managing and understanding data.