Project Template

This repository is depreciated. There is now a Quarto-based template that has been updated and improved.

Overview

Edit this section by replacing the (items in parens) below. This acts as a de facto pre-registration and can be used in your OSF project.

1. Title and author(s). (Be specific. Even if you’re unsure about the idea at this point; you can always update after consultation. If there are multiple contributors, consider specifying the CRediT taxonomy, as well.)
2. Summary of research questions or hypothesis. (What are you wanting to discover? If you’re exploring, what are you exploring? What do you expect to happen or to find?)
3. Motivation. (Provide some context for the previous statement. Why do you want to know? Be specific.)
4. Data. (How are you going to answer your question or explore your hypothesis? Are you using a dataset? If so, link to it here. Are you doing a literature review? State your criteria for selection. Are you exploring an experience or concept? State how you’ll take notes and gather information, for example your own actions or the observation/interviewing of others?)
   1. Have you begun gathering data? (Yes or No.)
   2. If yes, have you looked at the gathered data? (Yes or No.)
5. Methods. (On the heels of the previous item, what will your research method be? You may need to work with your faculty sponsor and/or the lab director on this.)
6. Plan. (Using the project timelines provided in the lab manual, describe your proposed process and plan to accomplish your project. Try to list the steps of your plan using SMART goals.)
7. Leveraging the lab. (How, specifically do you want to leverage the resources provided by the lab? Do you need time with some equipment, access to the space, research support from the lab personnel? If you need something specific, list this here.)

Template Information

Based on the template Setting up an Organised Folder Structure for Research Projects by Nikola Vukovic and tweaked by Ryan Straight with the MA{VR}X Lab in mind, specifically, as the focus is on using R for data analysis, this template is simple enough to fit most needs and has the media structure necessary for projects within the lab.

If you’d rather not use the R-based ecosystem for writing that’s present in the template, that’s fine. The folder structure will still serve you well.

A placeholder publication draft can be found in 4-Dissemination/2-Publications/000-DRAFT/. The actual report document being produced is an APA 6th edition document using the papaja package, and uses rfordatascience/tidytuesday code. You should also install tinytex, of course, as per the papaja instructions. Some demo code had been added to the script files and dummy text to the draft.Rmd to produce an example PDF. The Bee Colony losses dataset is loaded as an example. You’ll notice heavy use of the here package, as well.

This draft.Rmd file is just a demonstration, as you will likely want to keep your draft private.

Authors

1. Update the contributors_table_template.csv file in 1-Project_Management/4-Administration/ with relevant authors and contributors.
2. Upload the CSV in step 2 of the tenzing Shiny app. (You can use the file provided as a demonstration if you like.)
3. Choose Show papaja YAML in Step 3.
4. Replace the author and affiliation frontmatter in the draft.Rmd file with this new YAML.

Report

The resultant publications from this project go in 4-Dissemination/2-Publications/ in subfolders for each individual publication. The papaja document, draft.Rmd, has a variety of comments and instructions within as comments. These are general suggestions that follow a generic research paper structure.

Folder and file structure

This is the default structure for a project. It’s very basic and you should feel welcome to alter it to your liking. There is another README in the 3-Study/2-Content/2-Media/ folder that explains the extensive structure there. This structure is not meant to be in chronological order, just organized.

1. Project Management
   1. Proposals
   2. Finance (notes on seeking funding, copies of grant proposals, etc; contains NSF grant template)
   3. Reports (not papers; project-related reports like status)
   4. Administration (CRediT author list, publication checklist)
2. Ethics Governance
   1. Ethics Approval (IRB, CITI certification)
   2. Forms (blank consent, waiver, etc forms; completed forms should be stored securely)
3. Study (_TEMPLATE subfolder contains the following for each different study)
   1. Input (files/docs used in the experiment itself; survey instrument, anything)
   2. Content
      1. Data (raw and tidied data)
      2. Media (video recordings, audio, screencasts, so on; do not include identifiable participant content)
   3. Data Analysis (eda, munging scripts, transformation, etc)
   4. Outputs (tables, figures, etc)
4. Dissemination
   1. Presentations (archived)
   2. Publications (archived)
   3. Publicity (archived)

Note that the Dissemination folder is for archiving content. Once something is published or made available, put a copy in the appropriate folder.