Course syllabus

Course name: Introduction to Data Management Practices
Dates: 2023-04-18 to 2023-04-20
Location: Uppsala University, SciLifeLab, BMC, Husargatan 3, Uppsala
Contact: edu.intro-dm@nbis.se

This course will introduce important aspects of Research Data Management through a series of lectures and hands-on computer exercises. The course is intended for researchers that want to take the first steps towards a more systematic and reproducible approach to analysing and managing research data.

Note: We follow the recommendations and guidelines from Swedish authorities and Folkhälsomyndigheten. The course is designed to be an interactive face-to-face event. However, we follow the situation carefully and will deliver the course online if needed.

Course content

Topics covered will include:

  • Open Science and FAIR in practice
  • Organising data, files and folders in research projects
  • Describing data with metadata
  • Publishing data to public data repositories
  • Cleaning tabular data and metadata with OpenRefine
  • Writing basic recipes for data analysis and visualisation with R
  • Versioning data, documents and scripts
  • Writing Data Management Plans

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Describe some reasons for the principles of Open Science and FAIR
  • Organise their project files and folders in a structured way
  • Find, and select, relevant metadata standards for their research project
  • Find suitable public repositories for life science data, and have an understanding of requirements for submitting data to them
  • Clean up existing tabular data
  • Perform basic version control of files, and have means to learn more advanced skills
  • Perform basic data analysis and visualisations in R, and have means to learn more advanced skills
  • Have an understanding of the benefits of data management plans (DMPs), and what a DMP should contain

Application instructions

National course open for PhD students, postdocs, researchers and other employees within all Swedish universities. The course is geared towards life scientists wanting to take the first steps towards a more systematic and reproducible approach to analysing and managing research data. Due to limited space the course can accommodate a maximum of 25 participants. If we receive more applications, participants will be selected based on several criteria. Selection criteria include correct entry requirements, motivation to attend the course as well as gender and geographical balance.

Fee: 1500 SEK paid by invoice to NBIS. This includes lunches, coffee and snacks. Please note that NBIS cannot invoice individuals.

Entry requirements:

No previous programming experience is required but you are required to bring your own laptop with the required software pre-installed. Installation instructions will be provided before the course starts.

Application is open now

Application closes: 2023-03-10

Confirmation to accepted students: 2023-03-17

Link to application: https://forms.gle/SMc42jeEXA3szyPn7

Course staff