Unlocking the Potential of Research Repos: Dive into a Collection of Articles
A research repository, sometimes known as a “research repo”, is a centralized database or platform where researchers store, organize, and manage various components of their research projects. This includes raw data, findings, insights, reports, documentation, and other relevant materials.
The purpose of a research repo is to streamline collaboration, ensure data integrity, and facilitate knowledge sharing within research teams and across organizations.
However, simply building a research repository is not sufficient for optimal research operations. Thanks to the dedication and contributions of the ResearchOps community, we’ve curated a series of articles focusing on this practice to identify all the levers that need to be taken into account to put in place a good research repo lifecycle.
This article summarises our existing articles on research repositories and links to the full version.
With a global community we have a range of approaches to a repository and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. If you have experience of creating a repository and wish to post about it please get in touch.
Build: How to start, organizing data and accessibility
If you don’t know where to start and/or you need a new perspective of how to start a research repository this article 5 baby steps on the path towards a research repository by Samantha Sergeant may help you.
Samantha offers practical steps for initiating a research repository:
- Make a list of all the research you’ve done and put as much details as you need.
- Have a system for identifying research projects as unique. Depending on your organization find the system that will be the most efficient to search, store and find your research.
- Have one place where research is always shared.
- Utilize repo features in your existing software. Sometimes you don’t have to buy new software for this specific task but instead can use existing software and customize it, using tags for example.
- Make it’s someone’s job to maintain this. Research can be expensive so it’s always better to make sure the research is well captured, developed, documented and follows the processes that are in place.
‘The solution? Have one place where all you ask your researchers to always share their research by default, then allow and encourage them to cross-post it to whatever additional groups or channels they feel are appropriate to hit their stakeholder audience.’
To complete this article, you can read about Hugo Froes’s experience of building a repo in Building a Research Repo when you don’t know how.
Advocating for building a research repository
In a similar vein, I built a user research repository — you should do the same by Jonathan Richardson presents his process in detail to create a repository.
His 5-step process is:
- Locate all documentation and resources and either note their location or centralize in one place.
- Sift to remove duplicates and irrelevant information then tag with relevant categories and information.
- Group by your categories and tags to review and refine to make categories and user needs consistent.
- Have a usage and updating policy, either an existing one or one you create.
- Review the workflow and processes to ensure people are using it.
Maintain: Continuous improvement and maintenance of a research repository
One of the first articles written for the Research Ops community was by Kate Towsey and it Raises considerations and discussions on research data freshness in the context of a repository.
This article ‘What do you think about research data ‘freshness’ in the context of a research repo?’ highlights the conversations initiated around the subject and while it’s from 2018, its conclusions are still fresh.
The Key question covered by Kate’s article is “how long is it useful to keep research data around?”
While it depends of the type of research, the outcomes and the people that will benefit from the insights, putting in place an archiving strategy to enrich and date decision-making helps ensure the most relevant data is surfaced.
Practical use of repositories
Emily DiLeo underscores the notion that the mere implementation of a repository does not ensure that insights are used to their best advantage.
In Repositories in Practice: Using Knowledge Management to Create Research Stories, the ResearchOps community distills key insights from Emily’s talk:
1. Centralize content
- Gather all research materials and artifacts in one place for easy access.
- Acknowledge the challenge of centralization.
2. Implement description practices
- Describe research assets using standard descriptions.
- Advocate for archival description, drawing parallels with archivists’ practices.
- Emphasize the importance of providing maximum access through effective description.
- Describe two essential parts of description: information about the nature of materials and activities reflected in the unit being described.
3. Curate Content
- Decide what to include in the repository and setting clear boundaries.
- Underline the need for careful selection of content for better organization.
The article zooms in on the second practice — implement description practices — delving into the importance of providing archival descriptions for research assets. It introduces the concept of DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard), commonly used by archivists, to guide effective description for maximum access.
Emily DiLeo encourages researchers to reflect on and share their own research stories, emphasizing the value of debriefs and video recordings for knowledge sharing within teams.
Minimum Viable Taxonomies
The concept of Minimum Viable Taxonomy (MVT) Level 1 standard is introduced as a taxonomy for indexing research documents, supporting knowledge management systems. It outlines elements such as project title, date, target audience, and research method.
You can find more insights about the MVT in this article: Introducing the Minimum Viable Taxonomy Level 1
Maximize the impact: Standardization and consistency
These articles focus on improving research repo through feedback and adapting it to the ecosystem, and setting the research cycle.
Integration with workflows and tools
Jonathan Richardson in User needs refinement — why and how to do it? refined hundreds of user stories in the process of building a user research repository and identified valuable insights during the refinement process. He also shares an example repository before and after refinement.
His user needs refinement process includes:
1. Prepare for refinement
- Core user needs are identified from the overall set of needs.
2. Carry out the refinement
- Standardizing and reviewing needs in the format: As a/Who is/I need to/So that.
- Tagging, categorizing, and grouping the needs.
- Reviewing to reveal insights and gaps.
3. Standardize databases
- Columns are standardized as drop-down selectors to maintain consistency amongst a group of repository editors.
- Utilize drop-down selectors for User Type, Who is, So that, Theme, Category User Need, Journey Stage, and Project identification to maintain consistency.
4. Create additional columns for future teams to complete
- Projects this applies to, Failure impacts, Success impact, Success measures.
5. Tidy up and search for new insights
- Grouping by outcome reveals patterns and allows for a more comprehensive understanding.
- Initial focus on splitting “As a” into “As a/Who is” for consistent groupings.
6. Plan for continuous refinement
- Emphasize that refining user needs is an ongoing process, not limited to repository creation.
- Hold regular reviews as part of project initiation and conclusion.
- Ensure that there is team involvement in the review process for comprehensive understanding so that there
Key outcomes from this to expect include:
- Increased team confidence in understanding user needs.
- Improved user benefits through a better understanding of their needs.
Going from insight to product impact
In Activating insights to overcome common barriers to product impact, Jake Burghardt discusses a seven-stage process from insight to product impact in the realm of research operations.
These days, the industry is focused on research repositories as a means to fix the cutting room floor problem, consolidating research outputs and making them findable. But repositories, on their own, do not make past insights come to life. A tool, by itself, is not going to change product planning processes.
Each stage addresses specific challenges and offers ideas for research operations to enhance the integration of insights into the product planning process.
1. Gather sufficient evidence
- Focus on regrowing norms about big bets based on inspiring evidence.
- Invest in targeted synthesis from various teams and sources.
- Drive research roadmaps to collect more data in key areas.
2. Usefully articulate insight
- Establish insight writing and content standards.
- Create hierarchical insight themes to show the bigger picture.
- Match insight granularity to the targeted level of the planning process.
3. Be aware of an insight as a possible planning target
- Implement recurring ‘echo’ report readouts to keep insights in focus.
- Introduce new types of reporting to communicate insights effectively.
- Time communications to specific planning milestones to increase impact.
4. Develop and envision solution ideas
- Secure design resources to visualize potential solutions.
- Facilitate ideation for non-obvious problems.
- Cross-link solution proposals to insights for better progress tracking.
5. Prioritize plans
- Drive specific backlog items that address insights.
- Tie into primary goal-setting mechanisms.
- Report on action and inaction to establish norms of insight use.
8. Ensure quality execution and understand results
- Bring new stakeholders into the problem space during implementation.
- Check on quality assurance and experiment planning.
- Tabulate impact rooted in research to close out related problems.
The overarching theme is to extend the role of research from an optional input to an active stakeholder in the product planning process.
Jake Burghardt emphasizes the importance of operations, not limited to research teams, in activating insights and driving their integration into the product development life cycle. It encourages a shift in perspective regarding research repositories, suggesting they should not only be self-service hubs but also actively push specific insights to product teams through new operations.
The ultimate goal is to make research an integral part of product planning, involving multiple disciplines and fostering collaboration across the organization.
You can also watch video of Jake’s talk on the Learners website.
Co-designing a research library
Alison Jones introduces the concept of research library co-design in Dialogues on a digital library: Co-designing the Atlassian Research Library to enhance accessibility and streamline the process of accessing research materials.
Some of her key points are :
- The Atlassian Research Library functions as a record of research content rather than storing the content itself. Each research project is represented by a single record, linking to various content types such as research reports, shareback videos, and raw data.
- Consistent language is applied to fields using controlled taxonomies and term lists to ensure comprehensive search results. Free text fields allow for unique terminology to be applied to records.
- The importance of selecting the right platform to manage your library based on specific specifications, including excellent discovery capabilities, flexibility in field management, and ease of maintenance.
Providing colleagues with a proof-of-concept library with some suggested fields prompted much discussion about the fields we could use to describe the content.
Migration
In What migrating our research repository taught me about knowledge management, Jared Forney shared practical insights into the challenges and strategies involved in migrating a research repository, offering valuable lessons for others undertaking a similar journey.
- Reflect on the experience. Jared suggests thinking about communication plans early in the process, considering ongoing maintenance strategies, and celebrating achievements.
- Emphasize the importance of clear communication along with setting up a maintenance strategy, and recognizing and recording achievements throughout the project.
Sharepoint and Airtable research repositories - practical experiences
Lisa van Ekeren has provided a perspective from the Sharepoint ecosystem with this 2 articles:
- Building a repository in SharePoint, Part 1: Groundwork & Preparations
- Building a repository in SharePoint, Part 2: Development, maintenance & beyond
Her key points are:
- Take the time to understand your stakeholders’ pain points and wishes for the repository. This will help you get a better understanding of the ‘must haves’ and allows you to measure its success.
- Do your research and organize your thoughts by gathering your findings and resources in one place. Base your decisions on this ‘foundational knowledge’.
- Together with your team, agree what type of content will live in your repository and who needs access to it.
- Decide on your repository’s location from an access point of view: which location comes with the desired access rights and flexibility, and how do you ensure people have access to it?
- Move the content that will live in the repository to one place, for easy access and to do a ‘quality check’.
- With your team, decide on quality standards for your content and create your template(s) based on this.
- Hold the content against your guidelines and template(s): get it in shape for the upload!
- Base your taxonomy on research, ideally a card sorting workshop. This ensures you have a strong set of terms and term sets to build upon. Keep your first taxonomy lean and use managed metadata to support it!
Rachel Miles focus on this article ‘Managing Research Insights at a Portfolio Level’ on the way that she has implemented a research repository using Airtable at her team’s portfolio level.
Thanks for reading this far, as Rachel says:
Needless to say, there’s a learning curve both for consumers of the data and for people trying to replicate something like this.
ResearchOps is always keen to have more members join. If you have experience of creating a repository and wish to post about it please get in touch.
