Metadata best practices should be applied and followed throughout your research project to increase the accessibility and usability of your research data for you, your research team, and future users.
Metadata is data about data. Metadata describes and gives context to your data and research project. Metadata is key for research data access and re-use. Metadata makes it possible for others to understand your data, starting with top-level descriptive metadata such as title, creator(s), and date created, to variable-level metadata.
There are various types of metadata:
Metadata standards or schemas are made up of a set of authorized elements that describe your data. Many disciplines have their own metadata standards, as well as some data repositories. Use the directories below to find the metadata standard that best describes your research data:
Keep file names short, descriptive, and agree on and follow consistent conventions with your team. Here are some general guidelines and examples:
DO: SSHRC_Proposal_2022-04-01_v02.docx
DON'T: finaldraft1 or finalfinaldraft3
Scholars Portal Dataverse can accept any file format but to ensure the long-term accessibility and reusability of research data, widely used and supported, non-proprietary file formats are preferred.
Data Type | Preferred Format |
Audio | uncompressed and lossless Wav or AIFF, FLAC, Mp3 |
Container File | .tar, .zip; container files are automatically unpacked by Dataverse |
Image | uncompressed TIFF; acceptable formats: PNG, JPG |
Text | Unicode text (.txt), Comma/Tab Separated Values (.csv) |
Video | MPEG-4 (.mp4) |
Array data | netCDF (.nc) |
Statistical analysis | spreadsheet (.csv, .tsv, .tab, .ods), SPSS (.por, .sav), STATA (.dta) |
Geospatial | ESRI (.shp, .shx, .dbf, .prj, .sbx, .sbn), GeoTiff (.tif, .tfw) |
Markup language | XML, HTML, .css, .xslt, .js, .es |
Documentation | PDF/A |
This is not an exhaustive list. Please contact the RDM Librarian for more information on preferred formats.
In addition to the set metadata fields, ReadMe files provide a way for you to further document your research data. ReadMe files are usually formatted as text files to prolong their lifespan and ensure accessibility. There are no standards for readme files but should include:
Find more information on ReadMe files in the Guide to writing "readme" style metadata by the Research Data Management Service Group at Cornell University.