Fostering documentation

Provide a Process for Documentation

Documentation as a guiding light for people who may feel lost otherwise. The Turing Way project illustration by Scriberia for The Turing Way Community Shared under CC-BY 4.0 License. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3332807

Most researchers find documentation daunting, as they think that research-related responsibilities are already overwhelming for them. It’s obvious that they see documentation as an ‘added labour’ and not important enough for carrying out a research design, implementation, analysis or publication work.

The reality is that documentation is an integral part of all research processes, from start to finish.

A systematic process for documentation is more than a formal book-keeping practice because it:

• allows everyone in your research to understand the research direction and track progress;
• adds validity to your research work when systematically built on published peer-reviewed work;
• communicates different ways to contribute, enabling diverse participation in the co-development;
• upholds practices to ensure equity, diversity and inclusion;
• recognises contributions fairly;
• gives and shares credits for all work;
• tracks the history of what worked or what did not work;
• creates transparency about early and intermediate research outcomes;
• makes auditing easy for funders, advisors or data managers;
• helps reframe research narratives by connecting different work;
• explains all decisions and stakeholders impacted by that;
• gives the starting point for writing manuscript and publication; and more!

Facilitating Documentation in your Team

NOTE

Whatever your approach is, be firm about making documentation a shared responsibility so that this job does not solely fall on the shoulders of early career researchers, members from traditionally marginalised groups or support staff.

The biggest question here is probably not ‘why’ but ‘how’ to facilitate documentation so that it is not challenging or burdensome for the team members. Here are a few recommendations to make documentation easier:

• Allocate some time at the beginning of the project to discuss with the main leaders and researchers of the project about what should be documented.
• Keep the tasks simple by establishing a shared repository for documentation with standard templates to guide how one should go about documenting their work (It is always easier to start with a template than an empty sheet!).
• Add documentation sprint to your project timelines and milestones to make sure that everyone is aware of their importance in the project.
• Create visible ways to recognise and incentivise the process of documenting.

Keypoints

• Version controlled repository help record different contributions and contributor information openly.
• Open Science is an umbrella term that involve different practices for research in the context of different research objects.
• Online Persistent Identifiers or Digital Object Identifiers are useful for releasing and citing different versions of research objects.