Templates for consistency
Last updated on 2025-01-27 | Edit this page
Overview
Questions
- What are the benefits of having templates?
- How do templates make your research FAIR?
Objectives
- How to achieve consistency with templates
- How do templates help with FAIR
(13 min teaching)
What are Templates
Templates are documents with a pre-determined layout and style which allow for reproducibility of new documents based on the same layout/pattern/style/guidelines. For example a useful template are label templates that contain all necessary experimental information. Thinking back to our arabidopsis experiment, a tube label template for an experiment could contain: date, genotype, if short- or light-day.
Benefits of Templates
Use of such templates is incredibly convenient. If we were to print labels for tubes, using a template we could print an entire batch at once instead of having to do it label by label or hand write each individual one. Overall templates:
- save time
- enforce best practices (e.g. naming standards, using PIDs)
- provide guidelines for other users of the template
- assure consistency across sample collection, experiments, and data analysis
- allow automatisation of searching/processing/analysis
- ensure reproducibility! (FAIR)
Types of templates
Templates could be anything with a pre-determined layout and purpose to be used for repeating activities. For example templates could be:
- in an ELN for different experiment types (e.g. Benchling)
- for sample recording and registration (e.g. in Clinical Trial Management)
- for project structure
- for a readme file
- for a data management plan
Exercise 1: Your template (30 min at end of day + 15 min next day discussing templates)
Write your own group template for either
- a measurement (PCR on robot etc…)
- experiment (e.g. gene levels in response to stress)
In Excel or as a Document (txt/word) or Benchling (if you fancy using it!), also provide some example data.
Think about:
- what you will need as the producer
- what you will need as the consumer
- how you could limit the values (controlled vocabularies)
- what PID or ontology terms you could use to annotate
Drop the templates into the folder shared on the Notepad. Make sure to exchange emails in case Zoom dies.
- Templates save time
- Templates enforce best practices and ensure consistency
- Templates allow for automatisation of processes