Organizing and documenting your research data well is the key to understanding and reusing the data both during and after the research project.

A well-devised storage and filing system is central to organizing your research data. Which data you store and where and under what name you store them determines how intelligible your results are and whether they can be reused. It's a good idea to assess the way you are organizing data and to stick to one system.

Even if the research data are clearly structured, they will not be reproducible or reusable if they are not well-documented. Documenting research data provides information on the research method used and how the data were collected, examined and generated; it also covers metadata.