What you always wanted to know about Data Management.

GUIDELINES ON THE BEST FORMAT FOR YOUR DATA AND METADATA, including how to format dates, numbers, null values, column headings, etc. These are excellent, straightforward introductions and we request that you submit data following these guidelines.

1. Start here: Borer, ET, EW Seabloom, MB Jones, and M Schildhauer. 2009. Some simple guidelines for effective data management. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. April(2009): 205-214. [if you can’t get access you can request a copy from Dr. Borer via email.
2. Cook, RB, RJ Olson, P Kanciruk, and LA Hook. 2001. Best practices for preparing ecological data sets to share and archive. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 82(2): 138-141.
3. White, EP, E Baldridge, ZT Brym, KJ Locey, DJ McGlinn, and SR Supp. 2013. Nine simple ways to make it easier to (re)use your data. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 6(2): 1-10.
4. Strasser, C, R Cook, W Michener, and A Budden. 2012. Primer on Data Management: What You Always Wanted to Know. A DataONE publication (California Digital Library).
5. Karl Broman has some excellent, easy to implement suggestions that for organizing data on his webpage.
6. Software Carpentry has an excellent series of short lessons for ecologists on formatting the data in spreadsheets.
7. Michener, W.K., Brunt, J.W., Helly, J., Kirchner, T.B., Stafford, S.G., 1997. Non-geospatial metadata for the ecological sciences. Ecological Applications 7:330–342.

From: http://biotropica.org/guidelines-for-archiving-data-used-in-biotropica-a...