Research Data Management lecture - 🔄 Version control & 🤝 collaboration using GitHub

Welcome! This GitHub repository has been created for educational purposes and is set to public visibility so everyone can access and learn from it.

Structure

• Stata subfolder: contains code written in Stata (tested with State/BE 18)
• R subfolder: contains code written in R
• data subfolder: a folder you will add manually to store datasets (not included in the repository)

✅ Instructions

🍴 Fork this repository

1. Log in to your GitHub account (note: you may need to use two-factor authentication).
2. Create your own copy of the repository by clicking the Fork button in the top-right corner of this page. This will add a personal version of the repository to your GitHub account, where you can make your own changes.

📘 More info about fork and clone

2. Navigate to your GitHub account to check

🛠️ Clone it to your local machine

1. Open GitHub Desktop.
2. Go to File > Clone repository

3. Select your forked repository’s URL to start working locally.

4. Select For my own purposes to avoid sending your updates directly to the main project

📘 More info about fork and clone

✍️ Make your changes

Work on your version locally

1. Create a folder named data (⚠️ all lowercase) in your local copy of the repository
2. Copy the three RDM datasets to this data folder.
3. ⚠️ Double-check that data/ is included in the .gitignore file, to make sure these datasets are not accidentally pushed to the GitHub server.
4. Check that the three datasets in the data folder do not appear in GitHub Desktop. This is normal — the folder is excluded because it is listed in the .gitignore file.
5. Edit the code as needed to complete your tasks.

📤 Commit & push regularly

1. Save your changes with *Commit"

2. send them to GitHub with git push.

🔁 Keep your fork up to date

• Check with Fetch
• Sync your fork with the original repo to stay current. You can do this via a pull from the upstream repository.

📬 Submit a Pull Request (more advanced)

Want to contribute back? Submit a pull request to the original repository and share your improvements.

📚 Useful Resources

• Quarto self-paced initiation training website - A step-by-step online training resource developed by Swiss TPH Research-IT to help you get started with some of the Quarto basics at your own pace.

Credits

This course was orginally designed and delivered by

• Prof. M. Hetzel
• Dr. M. Kwiatkowski

The materials available in this repository are based on their original content, and were adapted adapted by Dr H. Langet in 2024-2025, with inputs and feedback from M. Bresser.

2025 tutors:

• Zhihan Zhu :)
• Anouk Petitpierre