Guidebook “Discover-Cite-Document: Research Data in the Social Sciences and Economics” published

After almost eight months of intense collaborative work, we are happy to announce the release of a guidebook on research data in the social sciences and economics. The idea of writing the guidebook was born in the course of a panel session on last year’s annual meeting of the “Verein für Socialpolitik” (VfS), the largest German-speaking economists association, where Jutta Günther (Halle Institute for Economic Research), Klaus Tochtermann (ZBW), Gert G. Wagner (German Data Forum and DIW Berlin) and Stefan Winkler-Nees (German Research Foundation) discussed both the potential and the need of data sharing in applied economics.

The panellists assessed that there currently is a lack of information on data documentation and citation in academic education.

Consequently, together with our partners from DIW Berlin, GESIS and the German Data Forum, we started to gather information on these topics. One year after the initial panel discussion, the hot off the press booklet was presented at this year’s annual meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik two weeks ago.

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New release of Research Data MANTRA (Management Training)

The Research Data MANTRA course is an open, online training course that provides instruction in good practice in research data management. There are eight interactive learning units on key topics such as data management planning, organising and formatting data, using shared data and licensing your own data, as well as four data handling tutorials with open datasets for use in R, SPSS, NVivo and ArcGIS.
This fourth release of MANTRA has been revised and systematically updated with new content, videos, reading lists, and interactive quizzes. Three of the data handling tutorials have been rewritten and tested for newer software versions too. Read the rest of this entry »