File formats and organization
On this page
See also:
- What is a data management plan
- Funder requirements
- Data management plan tools & examples
- Pre-registration
- Find data
- Collect data ethically
- Research with Indigenous communities
- File formats
- File naming, organization, versioning
- Document & describe
- Storage & backup
- Analyze & visualize data
- Prepare data for archiving, sharing
- Where to share data
- Data licenses
- Cite data
- Resources
Directory structure
Consider creating a readme.txt file, in your project's main file folder, that gives an explanation of the directory structure and describes the contents of the major folders. See MIT's README file & folder schema example.
Best practices
- The main folder should have an informative name. For example: title, unique identifier, and date (year).
- Subfolders should be divided by common theme. For example:
- research activity (interviews, surveys, experiment)
- parameter assessed
- data type (images, text, databases)
- kind of material (publications, deliverables, documentation)
- Consider restricting the level of folders to three or four deep and not to have more than ten items per folder.
Directory structure examples:
Psychology example | Marketing example |
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Source: Berenson, K.R. 2018. Managing your research data and documentation. American Psychology Association. |
Source: UK Data Service |