Data Curation

What is data curation?

Data curation is “the active and ongoing management of data through its life cycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship, science, and education. Data curation activities enable data discovery and retrieval, maintain its quality, add value, and provide for reuse over time, and this new field includes authentication, archiving, management, preservation, retrieval, and representation.”[1]

Why have data curation?

A registry is only as good as the data it holds.  Given registration is instant, it’s important to curate the registrations as part of a quality control and assurance process and to maintain the integrity and reputation of the research registry.

What is assessed in data curation?

Data curators assess registrations for the following:

  1. Duplicates
  2. Animal studies
  3. Case reports that are not ‘first in man’ i.e. the first time that a particular intervention is performed.
  4. Bizarre, inappropriate or spam entries
  5. Incorrect study types e.g. RCT labelled as a case series or labelled as “other” when a category from the drop down menu exists.
  6. Any other relevant issue – e.g. blank mandatory fields

Curators will report the relevant researchregistry UIDs and the reasons for flagging up the entry to the Director Riaz Agha, who will review the information and take action as appropriate e.g. remove the entry, change the study type, etc.

When does data curation happen?

This will happen on a weekly basis with different curators each week working on a rota.

What training do data curators receive?

All data curators need to pass a formal data curation assessment before being allowed to curate data on the Research Registry.  As part of their training, they receive appropriate learning material that helps educate them on data curation principles and what entries should be removed.

Future

This policy will be adjusted in light of the findings on ongoing research into how the Research Registry is functioning. Adjustments will be made in light of the evidence.

References

[1]. Council on Library and Information Sources. Available at: http://www.clir.org/initiatives-partnerships/data-curation (accessed 2 July 2015)