Resources
There are many helpful online resources on building labs and teams. Some are produced by other academics, and others are shared by industry professionals. We have curated a collection of these resources below that are complementary to the materials on Start Your Lab.
News & magazines#
- Three keys to launching your own lab by Leah H. Somerville, William A. Cunningham, June Gruber, Jay J. Van Bavel, and Neil A. Lewis, Jr., all of whom are social scientists with experience starting a lab of their own
Blog posts#
- Academic Benefits of Using git and GitHub by Mike Croucher, a technical evangelist and machine learning scientist
- Coding Career Advice: Using Git for Version Control Effectively by Mark Erikson, the Redux maintainer and open source software expert
Online books#
- The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science by Kieran Healy, Professor of Sociology at Duke University
Journal articles#
Researchers from multiple fields have published fascinating work on best practices for research teams and, more generally, team science. The articles referenced below are representative of a thriving area of scientific inquiry, many of which include observations and suggestions to help motivate your adoption of better tools and practices in the academic research setting.
Wilson, G., Aruliah, D. A., Brown, C. T., Hong, N. P., Davis, M., Guy, R. T., Haddock, S. H., Huff, K. D., Mitchell, I. M., Plumbley, M. D., Waugh, B., White, E. P., & Wilson, P. (2014). Best Practices for Scientific Computing. PLOS Biology, 12(1), e1001745. Link to article
Wilson, G., Bryan, J., Cranston, K., Kitzes, J., Nederbragt, L., & Teal, T. K. (2017). Good enough practices in scientific computing. PLOS Computational Biology, 13(6), e1005510. Link to article
Lee, G., Bacon, S., Bush, I., Fortunato, L., Gavaghan, D., Lestang, T., Morton, C., Robinson, M., Rocca-Serra, P., Sansone, S., & Webb, H. (2021). Barely sufficient practices in scientific computing. Patterns, 2(2), 100206. Link to article
Lowndes, J. S., Best, B. D., Scarborough, C., Afflerbach, J. C., Frazier, M. R., O’Hara, C. C., Jiang, N., & Halpern, B. S. (2017). Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1(6), 1-7. Link to article
Perez-Riverol, Y., Gatto, L., Wang, R., Sachsenberg, T., Uszkoreit, J., Leprevost, F. d., Fufezan, C., Ternent, T., Eglen, S. J., Katz, D. S., Pollard, T. J., Konovalov, A., Flight, R. M., Blin, K., & VizcaÃno, J. A. (2016). Ten Simple Rules for Taking Advantage of Git and GitHub. PLOS Computational Biology, 12(7), e1004947. Link to article
Osborne, J. M., Bernabeu, M. O., Bruna, M., Calderhead, B., Cooper, J., Dalchau, N., Dunn, S., Fletcher, A. G., Freeman, R., Groen, D., Knapp, B., McInerny, G. J., Mirams, G. R., Pitt-Francis, J., Sengupta, B., Wright, D. W., Yates, C. A., Gavaghan, D. J., Emmott, S., & Deane, C. (2014). Ten Simple Rules for Effective Computational Research. PLOS Computational Biology, 10(3), e1003506. Link to article
Ram, K. (2013). Git can facilitate greater reproducibility and increased transparency in science. Source Code for Biology and Medicine, 8(1), 7. Link to article
Eglen, S. J., Marwick, B., Halchenko, Y. O., Hanke, M., Sufi, S., Gleeson, P., Silver, R. A., Davison, A. P., Lanyon, L., Abrams, M., Wachtler, T., Willshaw, D. J., Pouzat, C., & Poline, J. (2017). Toward standard practices for sharing computer code and programs in neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience, 20(6), 770-773. Link to article
Zeng, A., Fan, Y., Di, Z., Wang, Y., & Havlin, S. (2021). Fresh teams are associated with original and multidisciplinary research. Nature Human Behaviour. Link to article
Wu, L., Wang, D., & Evans, J. A. (2019). Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology. Nature, 566(7744), 378-382. Link to article