Documentation
Like most research labs, we invest a deal of time into ensuring that our research efforts are standardized and well documented - not only for our internal use, but also for our collaborators, with the overall goal of reducing error and duplicated work. As such, we have set out to develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) for most of the routine work that we do in the lab. This includes everything from cloning single sainfoin plants to best practices for taking images in the field and where to store them.
Our SOPs follow a simple format with the following major sections:
- Authors - List of all authors of the document
- Purpose - The exact purpose of the procedure
- Scope - The limits of the procedure with regard to this documentation
- References and Related Documents - Any associated reference materials
- Materials - A list of all physical and digital assets needed for the procedure
- Definitions - A list of unfamiliar words or acronyms/abbreviations that need to be defined
- Detailed Procedure - Step by step instructions for completing the procedure, with photographs
- Data Storage Instructions - Where to store raw, intermediate, and processed data from the procedure, if any
- Flowchart - A high level flowchart of the procedure
- Troubleshooting - Any specific problems that a user might run into and how to solve them
- Notes - Additional comments about the procedure
As we continue to write and develop our SOPs we will publish them on Zenodo so that we can version them appropriately. We follow the semantic versionining standard with the format {major.minor.patch} which states that unstable (beta) versions should always start with a major version of 0 indicating that it might change at any time. Major versions indicate breaking, non-compatible changes with other major versions. Minor versions starting at 1 indicate non-breaking changes with the major version that add backward compatibility functionality. Patches indicate bug fixes that are backward compatibile. WHile this standard was developed for APIs and software versionining, we have found it of use to version documents as well.
SOP Table
The table below lists all of our currently published and unpublished SOP documents. Follow the Zenodo link to download them.