On Mon, 20 Aug 2012 01:08:31 -0700, José Ferreira-Alves wrote: >Dear Colleagues > >I did an extensive survey on the population whose main results were already >published. I wonder for how many time I must keep the original records of >that survey. Do you know if APA has any recommendations about the time we >must keep records from research?
In the 6th edition of the APA publication manual, see pages 12-13 which says: |Authors are expected to retain raw data for a minimum of five years |after publication of the research. (p12) Now, depending upon how long it takes for an empirical research manuscript to get published, this easily can increase to 6-7 years (the 5 year clock starts when the manuscript is published). Of course, it is possible that someone may ask for the data at some future time, say, for a meta-analysis or other purpose, and that can occur at any time. I think that a good policy would be to keep the data for about a decade and plan for keeping it longer. This requires that the researcher keeps the data "packaged" in a well-documented form, anonymous (i.e., no way to identify individual participants), and convenient format (i.e., do NOT save the data as an SPSS data file but as a raw text file which can be read by a text editor and easily imported into whatever future data analysis program exist in the future or other currently available statistical program). As also reviewed on pages 12-13, one should be prepared to share one's data, so doing the documenting/anonymizing/raw text formatting should be done early on and be available by the time the first publication is made. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=19887 or send a blank email to leave-19887-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
