Research Data Management#

Beyond the core features, a few good practices help keep a research corpus organized, easy to navigate, and secure throughout a project.

Following your ethics certification#

Before uploading interview transcripts or any other sensitive material, make sure this practice complies with the certification issued by your institution's research ethics board. Requirements vary from one project to another (prior anonymization, data hosting in a specific country, retention period, etc.): when in doubt, consult your ethics board before uploading.

Uploading your files#

Your documents (interview transcripts, articles, field notes, etc.) are uploaded from the Documents tab. See How to Import Files? for the steps and the list of supported formats.

Structuring your corpus with collections#

When a corpus contains dozens of documents, it becomes useful to group them into collections. The grouping criterion depends on your project, for example:

  • by type of material (interviews, press articles, institutional documents);
  • by country or collection site;
  • by participant group (e.g. by cohort, by organization);
  • by wave or point of collection (e.g. pre-intervention, post-intervention).

A document can only belong to one collection at a time: choose the criterion that best reflects your project's logic rather than trying to combine several.

Naming your files consistently#

A naming convention applied before uploading makes it much easier to locate documents once they're in LibreQDA. A few useful principles:

  • Start the file name with a date in YYYY-MM-DD format (e.g. 2026-03-14_interview_participant-04.pdf) so files sort automatically in chronological order in your file explorer and in the document list.
  • Avoid accented characters, spaces, and special characters, which can display inconsistently across systems.
  • Stay consistent from one file to the next: using the same naming template (date, type, identifier) for all documents in a collection makes teamwork easier.

Removing a person's access#

Responsible research data management also means removing access to a project once it's no longer needed, for example when someone leaves the team or the project has ended. This is done from the project's collaboration options; see How to Collaborate? for details on permission levels and how to proceed.