RDM Symposium 2021: Your Feedback and Our Responses

Our Research Data Management Symposium held in Oct was well-attended by 584 participants. In this post, you will find the post-event feedback collected from the respondents, selected comments, and our responses.

Key Stats

200 out of 584 participants responded to our post-symposium surveys. More than 90% of them agreed that the seminars and workshops were helpful and engaging. We also thank participants who put forward valuable suggestions for improvements and RDM-related topics – These help us shaping future activities!

Four RDM Seminars

A large majority of respondents gave positive feedback; they found the seminars to be helpful and engaging: 

Two DMP Writing Workshops

We received feedback from 33 attendees of the two Data Management Plan Writing Workshops. Most attendees strongly agreed that it was helpful, and the quality was good:

Selected Comments & Suggestions

Positive feedback

We collected many positive open comments, such as:

• “The three stories from the editor’s perspective gave valuable insights on the importance of data integrity. They tell the importance of always saving the original data and providing it upon request. It is also clear that manipulating data is malpractice. Researchers might get caught, and the stain of misconduct will always haunt the researchers’ credibility and reputation.”

• “I never notice the importance of reproducibility until this seminar. Florian’s talk is enlightening. Before the seminar, I only recognised that reproducible research helps my own paper writing. The seminar taught me that reproducible research also helps reviewers and researchers in the future.”

• “The delivery from the speaker was very nice, and the points he organized into slides were very clear. Thus, the seminar was very engaging and easy to concentrate on, even though it was on Zoom. Thank you.”

Suggestions & Our Response

Besides, participants also brought forth valuable suggestions on the arrangement and topics of the symposium. We value these opinions since they could help us provide better services in the future. Here, we highlight a few suggestions together with our responses.

“I totally agree that we should open more data. However, some data might be sensitive or contain privacy issues that could not be publicized. We would like to know how to make these data open.”

• Sharing sensitive data is an intriguing issue and deserves further attention. We had an event on a similar topic in the past and you may take a look at this summary. Besides, the Library continuously provides Researchers’ Series workshops which introduce the FAIR principles for data sharing. In the future, we would also organise activities to advocate and assist the secure sharing of sensitive data.

“The topic could be more disciplinary-specific.”

• While the symposium provided a general introduction to research data management, different disciplines may have varying practices in data management. Regarding the needs, we will put disciplinary-specific data-related support into consideration in our plans for future activities.

“The seminar organizers could collect some questions beforehand from the participants. This could save time for the seminar discussion.”

• Thanks for the idea of collecting some questions beforehand to smoothen the discussion. We will consider this option for future activities.

“For the DMP workshop, it would be better if we could have some exercises and specific examples on data management.”

• The first RDM workshop on 6 Oct has assigned some hands-on exercises, but it seemed hard to engage students, especially in the Zoom setting. Therefore, the repeat workshop on 12 Oct focused more on lecturing. We will explore how to balance the level of interaction and the quantity of individual hand-on exercises in the future.

Suggestions for Future Topics

We have collected 135 suggestions of the future topics for the library future events. Below we present a word cloud demonstrating the top 75 frequent words from these suggestions.

The top five concepts are data (127), management (25), research (24), software (17), and search (13). Other recurring themes include analysis (11), security (10), skills (8), visualization (8), sharing (6), license (5), privacy (4), specific disciplines, and software, such as python and Tableau, can also be spotted in the word cloud. These responses help us design future events for HKUST researchers.

We once again thank you for your participation in the symposium. We hope that the Research Data Management Symposium could benefit your research career. The Library will continue to organise activities to provide you with the current trend, knowledge and skills on research and publishing. Hope to see you again in our future events.

– By Lester Chan, Library

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