Documentation policy

Documentation is at the core of research management. Keeping organized and detailed documentation is key to reproducibility and verification. But it is most essential for researchers to keep track of their progress, research history and transfer knowledge.

Type and objective of documentation differ at different stages of research and methods used to create, collect and analyze research data such as experiments, observations and simulations. For example lab notes, codes for analysis or plotting, designing an experiment or observation in robotics and logs are all types of documentation.

Each MSc and PhD student including Postdoctoral fellows and staff are expected to create documentation or metadata in the form of a README file as text, markdown or machine readable format where it is described how a plot, a table, image or a video is created.

Lab journals (chemistry, robotics or other) are strongly advised to be kept in a digital environment together with necessary pictures or videos.

In case of research involving codes, scripts or creation of softwares, these should be kept in code repositories with appropriate README and dependency requirement files.